So this is not some grieving random person from crowd - Chas is a person whose libraries and contributions I value tremendously and he certainly made LOTS of contributions to clojure OSS landscape for free and out of his good will as well. So ultimately this feels like your parents are arguing (which is never a good thing) - you like them both and you just want the arguing to stop and you just want everybody to live together in harmony. But here you go, Chas has moved away from clojure now. And I have to say I am very sorry to see him go.
Seems to be an ego thing.
I'm not even mentioning the potential split in the community.
As a project maintainer I’ve made the mistake several times of being too permissive with pull requests. Someone comes along with a feature they’re excited to add to my project. I don’t need the feature myself. They exuberantly make a PR, and I eventually merge it. Before long it turns out there’s a bunch of bugs with that feature, and the original author is gone. Do I waste my time fixing their code, for a feature I never wanted and don’t use? Or do I ignore the bugs and let the smell of low quality work waft over my code base?
These days I default to refusing most feature requests, even if they have decent PRs. I write most software for fun, or to scratch an itch. I don’t do it because I want to manage a community. If you want to add features and build a community around a project I’ve written, great. I’m happy to link to your fork in my readme.
Forking is not a symptom of failure. Maintaining a fork is sometimes just the ticket price to control your destiny.