They did, they implemented a crazy fast terminal renderer (that still supports advanced features like right-to-left languages in Unicode, etc.) from scratch in about 3,000 lines of code just to prove their point:
A closed PR would have been even more damning for Microsoft. Especially given that Casey could have provided apples-apples benchmark results - not, what amounts to, a micro-benchmark.
From my perspective, there are two reasons why someone would build an entire project instead of opening a PR:
* Merely to be able to point and it and say, "see? see? I was right!" How obnoxiously childish.
* Implementing his ideas into a mature/non-greenfields codebase wasn't in-fact "extremely simple."
https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm