>I slightly worry that this will serve as a distraction for him in future project development, maybe lead to a broken release or a dev path and force me to look for a new tool - zeal often crowds out focus.

Between free software itself being highly political, with plenty of zealots writing code, and the progressivism (and anti-progressivism) in SV and the tech community at large, I don't see much evidence that holding political views creates more bugs or degrades software quality. When that happens, the culprit tends to be deadlines or negligence.

The closest thing to an example I can come up with of this happening is the developer who pulled left-pad from NPM for essentially political reasons, but that was an act of deliberate sabotage rather than the result of distraction.