> Nothing prevents you from forking it and treating it like your own code in a catastrophic scenario.

It’s much easier for deployment and distribution purposes to add a level of indirection in your codebase than maintain a fork of a large project. Maintaining a fork is a full time job in itself, especially for active projects where you’ll need to constantly be merging new changes and keeping up with the evolution of the internals of the project via the mailing list or other means.