Our industry has few innovative ideas in past decades ranging from small to large. Rust, React, Tailwind, Typescript, Nix come to mind. All these did things differently enough to seem weird at first.

Flutter is hands down the best DX product with a beautiful language. It is modern Qt and destined for great success given it doesn't get sent to Google's graveyard.

As for the fork, I don't see anyway it not significantly diverging from upstream because bug fixes might involve refactoring which would make difficult to pull in upstream changes.