Comment by beAbU

They're manipulating the reader into thinking it's their unachievably high moral standards that is to blame here: "...but that wasn’t good enough".

You can't "tried to be transparent about what we’d done" and "made it look like we were stealing the work" at the same time.

Either you announce yourself as "Pear, the VS Code Fork that will change the way you code", or you try to be very low key about it yet hope to retain plausible deniability when people call you on your BS.