I’m pretty sure devs are fully aware of what’s going to happen which is why they avoided putting their names on the project and included the source code.
Hammer was always going to come down since they included game assets in the build - news articles won’t really change much on this matter,
It blows me away that people do these incredible projects but just for the thrill of to see if they can.
Including a trademarked term right in the title is the thing that gets most fan projects. It’s a multiplier for takedowns, it can’t get any easier for companies than running a simple script that just searches Itch/Gamejolt/Github for terms and then doing a mass takedown of the results. And that will even catch things with 3 downloads.
Sure user-added* or redone assets could help, but just distancing the name would help a lot more. Having 100% new assets won’t stop a takedown if you use trademarked terms (see DMCA’s Sky), and the DMCA system doesn’t really discourage overstepping unless somebody has the willingness/money/time to take it to court.
*=image detection could be a thing as well though, so be careful with screenshots especially with a logo
