I have trouble laying that at the feet of Goyal, who was not really interested in the feature, but who was willing to provide feedback and appeared willing to accept a patch.
The person working on the patch decided that they didn’t think the sixel library (which they were the maintainer of, so they presumably had a well informed opinion) was up to the task.
The description of sixels as inferior also came from the person working on the patch.
You can add this to the enormous pile of open source forks that didn't survive long enough to have any real value to the industry.
I respect that Goyal has been bitten by this dynamic before and said this back in April 2020:
> That said, I wont refuse a patch to implement it on top of the existing graphics support, provided I was reasonabl confident the person implementing it would stick around to maintain it as well.
It's not like Goyal doesn't accept any patches [1].
I don't use kitty myself, but many people who do seem to love it. I've come around to feel that this is truly a maintainer's judgment call. After all, they are almost always stuck maintaining the code no matter who wrote it initially, and they know better than anyone else what code they're personally comfortable maintaining.
More generally, if you like a piece of software enough, you're implicitly trusting the maintainers' judgment. You're certainly not reviewing every single line of code they write to see if you agree with it. If they betray your trust enough then you move on, but if you keep using the program then the maintainers' judgment was right enough.
The miserable survival rate of hostile forks also demonstrates that even if people care enough to fork over one issue, they rarely care enough to maintain the overall project long-term, despite implicitly asking the original maintainers to do the exact same thing.
The person working on the patch decided that they didn’t think the sixel library (which they were the maintainer of, so they presumably had a well informed opinion) was up to the task.
The description of sixels as inferior also came from the person working on the patch.