[ImPostingOnHN]

The wording as-read certainly makes it sound like that: A fork of a thing is not that thing. Thus this is not KDE, it's a fork of KDE. Thus this wasn't originally called the K Desktop Environment, it's a fork of something that was originally called the K Desktop Environment.

Viewed in this context, the second point sounds weird: it was never rebranded, the fork was called TDE from the beginning, and the reason it can't (shouldn't) call itself KDE is because it isn't. What the KDE leadership calls KDE is KDE.