They're not doing their own thing. They're doing the same thing with a different name and have no intent to contribute original patches that don't change the name. It takes about two seconds in GitHub's UI to fork, and about five minutes of fiddling with sed to change it to the degree that they changed it.
Maybe they have a different vision for it. And sometimes people prefer to work under different conditions. The ends don't justify the means. People jump from one insurance company to another insurance company for changes in leadership every day. If these people don't want to work under the current leadership I'd say they aren't doing the same thing.
They aren't working under the current leadership. None of them work on Rust and none of them plan to work on Crab. There is no point acting like five minutes fiddling with sed is the start of something big in the first place, but especially when the authors explicitly state that they aren't planning on starting anything.
If you check my posts on this subject I never said anything about this being big. I even said it'd probably fail.
I didn't know the authors had no intention of not doing anything with the repo. In which case it's just someone trolling. Which is also not a big deal.