There's been a bit of a furore in the emulation community lately centred around the PlayStation 1 emulator DuckStation, which has now seen two license changes recently.
Forks are used by developers to not only "fork an application", but also just to fork the repo, work on their own branches, and push (PR) them back to the main repo. I have forks of many repos, but that doesn't mean "i have forked the application under a new name".