Now they have their "own flavor" of Trino and a brand new open table format called "HogLake". This gives the impression of making excuses with little introspection.
It would be great to see their ducklake fork, their patches and github issues so the community can learn.
Author here. Our fork, like most of our work is public on Github: https://github.com/postHog/ducklake I think it does not include 100% of all changes since a few we upstreamed directly (to a few extensions related to Ducklake too) but if you are really interested, you can find them too.