Once a new version of my favorite file manager came out with remapped key bindings. I can't even remember the name of it now. But my own anger was memorable as totally out of proportion even when I was feeling it. My investment in muscle memory had been trashed! I thought several evil thoughts before calming down. So while it sounds trivial I can understand why the reaction to the crime of Betrayal of Muscle Memory has escalated to "fork you".
and most times it's not really any value added; it's something lame like "this other popular product does it this way" or "industry standard" or "our human optimization team found this was better" and give the middle finger to previous users. It happens with all interfaces, but people look to stuff like emacs and vim to be better than that
Not just emacs. I don’t care about emacs at all. What makes this story important is pointing out the arrogance of devs that love to “improve” things without any regard for people’s settled expectations. That applies as much to google maps or iOS as it does to emacs.
More generally, any frequently used software should be made “muscle-memorizable”, and then should not break it in later versions without good reasons. Muscle memory has the benefit of enabling “blind” and semi-asynchronous operation of the software, without constant visual confirmation for each micro-interaction. There’s unfortunately a trend in desktop software to make operation by keyboard ever more cumbersome or outright impossible.