I feel like had he not picked up on the SJW IDPol BS, he'd be the only person left working on his project and he'd get tons of "transphobe" comments hurled at him by his old snowflake friends. I guess he cared about protecting his reputation in the developer elite cult more than anything.
Poking around ROM hacking forums now (SMWC, Kuribo64, Jul, RHDN etc) people on them seem far more troon-rights aligned than pretty much any other community out there, literally declaring that they will ban for wrongthink in most cases.
So I could literally see people on those shaming people for using code by "transphobic" people or whatever, or those that refuse to integrate IDpol in software development.
Eventually because of the mainstream nature of this activism and Twitter/Discord within the emulation and Nintendo community no one would use higan anymore as idiot people would be brainwashed into being too scared to support its use.
TL;DR he wanted to remain an internet celebrity for people that wouldn't give a fuck about him anymore if he had his own opinions about stuff instead of following the sheep - so made shitty compromises for the sakes of those people and this led to his mental degradation.