I'd see less need for this fork if Zed's creators weren't already doing nefarious things like refusing to allow the Zed account / sign-in features to be disabled.
I don't see a reason to be afraid of "fragmented ecosystems", rather, let's embrace a long tail of tools and the freedom from lock-in and groupthink they bring.
Well there's features within Zed that are part of the account / sign-in process, so it might be a bit more effort to just "simply comment out login" for an editor that is as fast and smooth as Zed, I dont care that its there as long as they dont force it on me, which they don't.
I have this take, too. I tried to show how valuable this is to me via github issue, but the lack of an answer is pretty clearly a "don't care."
For what they provide, for free, I'd say refusing to disable login is not "nefarious". They need to grow a business here.