It allowed for the chaffs to fall through making node a stronger project because it was clear that neither of the sides was going to "win" outright.
If the argument is that "maintainer is not doing his/her job of being a maintainer" and this argument is accepted by the users, then should the project be forked by someone who will do his or her job of being a maintainer, the users will flip their source repo pointer and move onto the fork effectively killing the original.
Does the fork care as much about TechEmpkwer benchmarks? What happens if it is slower because it forbids unsafe even where it makes sense?
There was a looming cliff in Async/await, which caused a split to some extent (some old libraries that no longer have maintainers, changes that make updates difficult). A fork with those changes looming would mean divergence when rewriting to support Async/await.
Maybe I'm being too cautious, but I doubt we'd have had a successful fork earlier. Let's see if it happens now ...
I was there (as a user who closely followed development) during the nodejs > io.js split. While it worked out in the end, it felt like a bitter battle at first. Node survived by chance perhaps.
We have our async-std vs Tokio right now, I'd imagine having another split (at least in opinions and preference) on actix would still keep tension high.