The Lemmy project openly describes itself in its public documentation as anti-US, and was apparently founded around the idea that Reddit is fundamentally anti-China and pro-US: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
The doc starts off talking about open source, but it quickly becomes clear that the Lemmy project is primarily political in nature.
To me this is concerning -- what happens when largely pro-US Reddit refugees swarm a community (community in the general sense, not the Lemmy sense) which was intended by the founders to combat those peoples views? Sure, instances and people can choose to ignore the lemmy.ml instance, but the founders control the project at a much deeper level than that.
Personally I hope that alternative implementations that are compatible with Lemmy arise, totally outside of the influence of the original founders. Yes there is kbin, but I actually prefer the Lemmy model (from what I've seen so far), and I think there would only be benefits of having another high quality implementation which is totally separate yet totally compatible with the original Lemmy. It would make the whole thing more resilient, and could be fertile ground for future improvements to flourish.
I had already formed conclusions after reading through one of the founder's comment histories (which I'd encourage), so my reading of it may have been biased. Either way it's clear that the motivation driving them is, or at least was, largely political in nature.
They own the github repo, they control what code gets committed, they control whether the project lives or dies really. They have the power to lose interest or decide to abandon the project, at which point the best hope the community has is that others pick it up. It's not normally something I worry too much about with open source projects but again, strong geopolitical associations makes it feel precarious to me -- if they don't like where things are going, maybe they'd feel motivated to actively shut it down and discourage any peaceful transition of (code) ownership. Obviously this is all conjecture.
I'm not sure why you think I'd have trouble believing that!