To side-step the entire ordeal about whether the NDA terms/DMCA notice/... is real or a fabrication by Gio (about which there hasn't been a statement yet), or argue about personalities/petty grievances/emotions/'is X the right thing to do in context Y'/..., I think it is more productive to have a look at material, noticeable things happening in the background.

I have been recommending Homestuck to friends and acquaintances throughout the years (though with a sizeable gap between 2016 and 2022), which (as both MSPA and homestuck.com don't really host the comic anymore) meant regularly pointing people towards the UHC. During those recommendations, I did notice changes in the website, e.g. screenshots/previews disappearing, the Asset Pack suddenly being hosted elsewhere and at one point not even being linked to directly anymore. This sometimes went to such an extent that I had to edit old posts of mine so they wouldn't fall prey to link rot (e.g. the UHC online viewer disappearing, project ownership moving from Bambosh to Gio, and so on). At one point the HICU (well, the Homestuck Github organization) made a fork, but only to add a single version bump (from 2.5.6 to 2.5.7) which changed some "About" texts and project URLs ( https://github.com/GiovanH/unofficial-homestuck-collection/compare/main...homestuck:unofficial-homestuck-collection:main ), and then let it languish, while the "official" (Gio's) repository kept receiving updates and bugfixes all the way to version 2.7.1. Meanwhile, last year, the change of SAHCon's leadership (which Gio alleges is because of similar tactics) is similarly publicly documented.

I remember the Homestuck Made This World podcast talking about how, when Hussie needed help with e.g. a soundtrack or specific visual asset for a Flash in Homestuck proper, they'd describe what they wanted to whoever was helping out, but giving zero context. This is probably fine for one-off things (especially to prevent any details from leaking), for a comic which is for a sizeable part improvised, published right after having finished drawing it, and based on some sort of 'dialogue' (in a very wide sense of the word) with the fandom. But such a work style feels incredibly detrimental to larger-scale projects where 'real teamwork' is needed. So initially, when the "2021 Hiveswap drama" was happening (I wasn't active in the fandom at all at that point, so I only heard about it relatively late), my takeaway of it was "Hussie's personal working style being incompatible with teamwork, so of course it ended up in total chaos (while more solo projects, e.g. Psycholonials, seem to have gone better)", with the 'allegations against Hussie etc.' probably being grounded in some form of truth, while being very much exaggerated and amplified into other stuff by both sides.

As Gio's explanation of the course of events seem to match the observed things while giving a single explanation for all of these, I must say I'm inclined to believe that there is at least some truth to these accusations, though the exact extent of these things might be exaggerated (considering how there are a number of petty interpersonal issues mixed in). If a rebuttal is to be published, it will have to address this, rather than purely countering wording and what could have been "the right thing to do".

(Personally, for example, I find these NDAs to be very weird and wouldn't sign a single one of them. But also, I'm an academic, which means I might be dealing with some very export-restricted hardware from a big CPU manufacturer while still not signing any NDAs, to such an extent that I'm allowed to have my avatar be a photo of one such chip. The restrictions on these chips are a bit silly anyway as all the documentation, together with working implementations that do the fancy new thing, are already publicly available online. Oh well.)