Afaik solana full nodes require basically datacenter level networking (unless you have like gigabit fiber at home) while more people could run an Eth full node at home on cable internet. That's one aspect of a sacrifice in decentralization in the Eth vs Solana debate.

Good question. I don't have the answer, but maybe it has to do with the market game theory? I mean, there's easier ways to make money. Like, copypasta smart contracts from Ethereum to EVM-compatible chains. But, to fork Solana or another distributed state machine that's currently in beta and quite unstable (and has an unintuitive programming model) is to take on immense complexity, and therefore liability.

If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.

If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.