“Standing in the road to be a roadblock against the forces of proprietary software does nothing when those forces can just drive around you.”
In 2015 an Emacs developer wanted C++ code awareness. Stallman blocked using clang and demanded a list of every use case before GCC would expose its AST. The project died. A year later Microsoft shipped the Language Server Protocol and every editor got the feature anyway. Emacs was still waiting on a list. Principle without results is just a roadblock.