Not clickbait at all. The article explicitly discusses how Qt might go defacto proprietary _despite_ Qt Company's arrangement with KDE.

"The 12 month restriction would, in principle, not make Qt proprietary software, but it might as well be proprietary from a practical point of view."

The KDE project already lacks manpower, I'm not sure they will be able to maintain a free Qt fork for long.

Maybe we can have a separate foundation to maintain Qt fork. It's akin to MariaDB.

References? Have you ever heard of KDAB and other companies supporting Qt on a professional level?

It’s a perennial problem with all major FOSS projects and KDE is massive, it’s basically a given. At the time I followed it a bit more closely, there was clearly a churn of developers very similar to what JWZ described, with constant rewrites of entire applications because nobody had the time and inclination to maintain old ones (maintaining other people’s code is hard). Yes, the associated entities do a lot of good work, but it’s never enough - and realistically, nowhere near enough to be responsible for the entire Qt library.