Perfect way to kill the project

It's primarily a brand management and marketing problem, not technical though, right? All of the developers, customers and service providers in the ecosystem have source code licenses, in the same way Autommatic "took over" maintenance of a plugin which they depended on that was developed by a competitor, so too could their competitors. The real sticking point is that they won't be able to use the WordPress(tm) trademark, except by reference, without an unlikely shake up of the WordPress Foundation/wordpress.org, so they need to get a critical mass to understand that "GrafSquash(tm)" or whatever is the "new" WordPress with detailed instructions on how to change the update repo for an existing install, for people who are not that invested in the drama. There seems to be plenty of president of forks moving on with a new trademark back in the day with Hudson/Jenkins, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, or Mambo/Joomla and other examples im forgetting.

In fact the OpenOffice v LibreOffice transition is a cautionary tale on the power of branding and trademarks, since IIUC the 2014 version of OpenOffice still has substantial new installs even though it's effectively abandoned, because its well known.

WordPress has such a large installed base it's not credible to me that it could be killed, no matter what nonsense Autommatic gets up to, but it could definitely have a substantial change in how maintenance is funded and its name.