Akin to one day, Einstein being known mostly as meaning 'idiot' rather than a physicist.
Example: people think rabbits mostly eat carrots because Bugs Bunny likes to snack on them while leaning on something and saying "What's up, Doc?". Except Bugs doing that was a reference to a movie where Clark Gable... ate carrots while leaning on a fence and calling people Doc.
And somehow a parody of a Clark Gable movie turned into most people believing that carrots are a staple of leporine diets.
If that is the case, why is the misconception also widespread in countries where Bugs Bunny wasn't part of the popular culture? E.g. USSR/Russia.
Look up the history of the word "nice" in England, sometime. But no, it is not just an English-speaking phenomenon, either.
To me it seems like the people who created the fork may literally not have any known means of judging engineering merit aside from how detailed commit messages are.
If it's a large group then detailed commit messages are critical. If it's likely that between 0-1 people are actually going to read the message in the next month and there are a long list of other plans you have to implement with between 0 and 1 people actually helping you, then the value of more detail in commit messages moves toward the limit of 0.