[inopinatus]

The solution to the given problem with “fork it” is not to use any major dependency for which you aren’t already prepared to maintain a fork. The way to ensure that is fork it preemptively at the start of product development. I’ve maintained bugfix and feature forks of major dependencies with millions of lines of code, and not only does the merge from upstream become for the most part quite straightforwardly routine, I can say it’s much easier today using git than a vendor branch was back in the days of CVS.