Anyone can claim they are doing this, that or the other thing easy as writing this.
The benefit of the doubt extended to it out of common courtesy only lasts so far without concrete evidence of it actually being true, after which such statements become entirely meaningless.
I'd also point out you've yet to explain *why* it should matter. Just because you want to believe it does, doesn't make it so.
And?
Because I view it as a creator.
I understand you view it from the consumer side. But it's only meaningless if all you ever care about is deciding if you should keep wasting your time following a project or not.
Anyone can claim anything. It's just common courtesy, it's about boundaries. The only creators i know that would be soulless enough to steal a project from someone without their blessing are either egomaniacs or talentless dickheads.
Therefore, it's actually not meaningless, because if a creator hasn't declared a project dead or given its blessing, you got little to no hope of seeing any qualitative take over or spin off. Which is, there again, precisely my point from the start, seemed a bit too obvious to care to articulate.
I wouldn't care about establishing a hard coded ruleset for categorizing the probabilistic nature of a future update. I judge the character of a creator less by their public statements and more by their work ethic and the heat of their passion (because that's the real statement).