Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
There are various obstacles to “just forking” a project; it requires times to understand the frameworks / libraries used in the project, understand the code and its different parts and last but not least, have a interest to invest that time and energy (most often, that time could be spent developing your own solution that would fit your usecase better).
As for the stage I was referring to, both the theories of enshittification and rot-economy see software and services going through stages to attract new users, before going in for the profit maximizing.