avoided commenting at the time because i assumed there was some piece of information i'd missed. yuzu was a tiny company, but i suspect as soon as the legal threat came in, lawyers from prominent open source organizations would have advised them - and the advice clearly has to have been "no, you're turbofucked".
i am not a lawyer, but my belief is that yuzu fucked up in a way that is literally impossible for most other emulators to fuck up.
it wasn't just the fact they offered a paid option - it appears to have been that they specifically advertised "hey, why not pay for a version that works better with tears of the kingdom..." at a time when the only version of TOTK that the vast majority of people could access is the one that fell off the back of a truck.
once you do something like that, it becomes a lot harder to make arguments about being for personal backups and/or format switching only.
and everyone suffers as a result.
alongside citra's loss seriously impacting 3DS preservation 1 (particularly with the fact a lot of cartridges may already be unusable with the cheap storage), we're already seeing the chilling effect with other emulators and emulation tools being voluntarily pulled, such as gamehook used by speedrunners and pokemon challenge runners.
nintendo themselves suffer - not necessarily from this specific instance, but a lot of their games are in conversation with nostalgia that nintendo will not let new players experience.
if a new pokemon fan who started with the let's go games wants to see what red/blue/firered/leafgreen were like, they cannot do that purely within nintendo's walls. (red and blue were possibilities before the 3DS eShop shutdown, but not now)
part of the selling point for splatoon 3's DLC was getting to visit splatoon 1's hub, but that's not the same as understanding why people enjoyed splatoon 1.
of the characters and stages in smash bros, how many have their debut game officially accessible in some form right now following the 3DS/Wii U eShop shutdown, and how does that compare to the third party roster? 2
so hurray. no one wins
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i'm sure there already is a fork, it's just it's the one that had name recognition.
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banjo being the one third party i can think of where their debut isn't officially accessible in some form, as diddy kong racing remains vaulted