If there is still space for another little bounty I can provide my indipendent and peculiar perspective; followed the knots developments for a lot and already scrutinized the changes for the gentoo linux distros that used to be based on knots by default as Luke Dashjr was one of the maintainers. Then drama happened, with Luke Dashjr propending for a "modular codebase" with the intention of splitting the software in little pieces, and the gentoo guys that didnt see this as a sustainable and maintainable way. Now the default bitcoin-core in repository is a mono-package and Luke Dashjr is no more the maintainers.