Looks great. I remember a company sort of bought it but afaict they didn’t monetize it. I don’t remember the strategy, or why it was acquired, does anyone recall it?

It’s the same company that bought MuseScore, they basically plan on monetizing it through plugins, audio samples, or optional cloud services (like MuseScore)

They must have abandoned such plans (if they had any) when they got some backlash after they added telemetry features and half a dozen forks popped up overnight.

They haven't

Just go the main homepage and there is a banner which leads you to buy the latest plugin

https://www.audacityteam.org/

But hontestly nothing wrong with that imo

> half a dozen forks popped up overnight

There is only one actively maintained fork https://tenacityaudio.org/