Most people don't spend this much time on PR before releasing their fork though.
If they had worked on this publicly from the start I'm sure a lot of the current PRs would have generally been of better quality as they could get community input earlier.
Oh I see now! Your comments about the merits of the pull requests are just bad faith; you're actually making this totally different point about the project that has absolutely nothing to do with squashing or commit messages. Thanks for clearing that up.
It was definitely not bad faith. They're pointing out that OpenTF isn't bothering to hold to quality standards that Hashicorp had for Terraform before the fork and they aren't trying to raise beyond those standards to reach the levels common in higher quality community projects like Linux, Kubernetes, LibreOffice, and OBS Studio.
A project being run by professional developers who have a lot of experience working with the Terraform code should be capable of doing this.
If your problem with a project is that it advertised itself to its target audience prior to releasing a repository, then a good faith comment would say something like, "My problem with this project is that they have spent more time writing manifestos and blog posts and social media comments so far than they have spent developing strong processes and working on publishing a repository for the project".
But if that's your real problem with a project, then a bad faith comment might look like "This is a bad pull request, how could you let it get merged?". The reason that is in bad faith is that it says nothing about your actual problem with the project, it's just a totally random swipe that you don't even actually care about. If there turns out to be a good answer to the question, like "Oh you're right, we forgot to require squashing pull requests when merging, I've fixed it now!", then instead of recognizing that your complaint has been spoken to, you are likely to simply find further things to criticize, because the first thing wasn't actually your real criticism, it was just a smokescreen.
Now, if you are making this other, better, point that the OpenTF project should have more mature software development practices, at least equivalent to and ideally exceeding the better-known project they have forked from, then yep, I agree with that criticism and do not think it is necessarily being made in bad faith.
However, I would be significantly more sympathetic to that criticism if it were a comment on an article entitled "OpenTF project celebrates one full year since its conception" rather than one entitled "OpenTF repository is now public".
The project is brand new, and they clearly rushed to get out a public repository because of other haters who were giving them crap about taking too long to publish the repository, and their processes clearly haven't matured yet. (Or I dunno, maybe it was even many of the same haters, because again, this is the tendency with people who criticize in bad faith, to just move on to the next random criticism that they don't actually care about.)
So if we get to a year from now and their processes remain immature, then yep, I'm right there with you on your criticism. But I think it's crazy (and, sorry to keep repeating myself: likely in bad faith) to make this criticism of such a new project. There is absolutely no indication that the developers running the project are incapable of having mature processes for the project, from the tiny amount of data available from the tiny amount of time that has elapsed since they announced the project.
I think you're confusing X/Y and faith here. You're making the basic assumption that the comment itself is in bad faith because it's not formulated the way you expect. That doesn't stand up to scrutiny because everyone evaluates and expresses things differently, and many folks would consider that a bad faith evaluation of feedback (whether it is positive or negative in reality wouldn't matter).
I think there's a stronger argument of an X/Y problem in the statement, since they talk about what they see as output vs what they expect to see instead.
And frankly, I am disappointed too, as these people working on this project should have spent all that time understanding how Hashicorp actually handled the codebase and ensured that their own engineers followed the same quality level for development. They're all definitely capable of it, so they should actually do it.
Otherwise it's going to be hard to trust the fork to succeed.
There's nothing more I can say on the bad-faithness thing that I didn't already say in my last comment. I think the comment speaks for itself, and I don't agree that it is "X/Y", or itself a bad faith evaluation.
(I do think you may be missing that I was responding to the entire sequence of comments, which started with just a drive-by swipe at pull request merging process, not just the later comments expressing disappointment with the perceived emphasis on marketing over engineering.)
I think your direct expression of disappointment is totally reasonable. I personally think it's also super premature to be disappointed, but it's your prerogative.
But I just think the other commenter's approach to expressing this criticism was way off base.
If they had worked on this publicly from the start I'm sure a lot of the current PRs would have generally been of better quality as they could get community input earlier.