One guy associated with the project, but never a contributor to the firmware, decided to create his own vibe-coded client/app and to trademark the name of the project. The rest of the team said "no" to that and continued doing what they were doing before.
The reason Meshcore works better for texting is the different routing. It has nothing to do with the recent drama.
I'd argue at this point there's more MeshCore networks in the world than Meshtastic