Rubbish. The license change was the reason for the fork of community, and people switching. Quality was never cited as the issue.

and Steve Yegge is currently just burning mountains of money with Gas Town or whatever came after that

While I don't actually disagree - to me, Gas Town sounds literally insane - I suspect that if you reframe his work to compare it against the cost of developing a new medication or chip fabrication technique, you can make a strong argument that he's putting his money where his mouth is to see how far he can take a new technology. He's doing science! And I think that's admirable, even if nothing comes of it.

When I think of how much money gets wasted on gambling apps and how much human potential gets wasted watching reality television and compare that to Steve going full Alexander Shulgin with LLMs, the comparison really falls flat.