It was absolutely a hostile takeover. And now the copyright thing. It's obvious what they want to do with the former community project.

Fortunately the awesome Forgejo fork exists.

I think you first need to define "community". The majority of the code contributors seems to have been actually fine with this change and continue to contribute to Gitea. Only a minority moved to Forgejo.

Personally, I also prefer Forgejo because I share their concerns about the future of Gitea owned by a for profit entity, but let's not invent a false history here.