What makes it hard is that upstream users have no attention bandwidth to dedicate to your project's (meta-project's?) internal disputes. They're just going to decide which fork they think is the main one and use that. If you look at Presto, that's a good example of how hostile forks tend to go; both sides have to insist they're the real project, the main project, because otherwise nobody will use them.

Maybe there's a solution to that other than avoiding forks, but I'm not sure what it would be. It seems like a pretty fundamental challenge.