I'm guessing that most of these pseudonymous developers—of which there can't possibly be too many—would distrust Google enough not to contribute even if it were easier to do so without a Google Account.
As a pseudonymous developer, I fail to see any harm in contributing to projects run by Google in general. Fuchsia is not a monopolist way to exert control over the market (not today at least), it doesn't seem to be explicitly made for evil, and can be forked to let the community steer it.
I would not be surprised if Google account ToS has some point that complicates things for contributors or people forking the code.
I haven't read Google ToS lately so I can't say there is something like this but that document is huge and keeps changing all the time.
If I was a pseudonymous developer, I would probably not go through that.
As of today, there are no phones running Fuchsia, so it's hard to evaluate if it's going to be useful for any kind of control. Does it have feature parity with Linux?
Forking can be practical without competing for the same use case.
Both of these are true, and it is indeed possible that Fuschia is intended to be genuinely open.
However that seek unlikely given that there are many actors who would like to exclude Google services from their devices and Google is at the same existential risk if that happens as they were when they introduced Android.
And yes forking can be practical, but it very often isn’t, partially in the case of a very large corporately sponsored codebase. So ‘we can just fork it’ doesn’t mitigate the concerns.
