It's not clear at all why the current maintainers wanted/needed this re-licensing. I guess that their employee, Monarch Money, wants to use derivative work in their application without releasing the changes? It was already LGPL, perfect for a library, not GPL.
Python wouldn't take LGPL code in the standard library. And Dan Blanchard imagined more people would want to work on it.[1]
[1] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...
That take and the link within it to https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36 which is from 2014 (!!) and revived in 2021 (!) make me think now that Dan Blanchard is in good faith, but still acted in a naive manner. Rewriting from "scratch" with Claude Code and basically taking over the project by changing the license, all in one single pull request, well... it's not going to end well on the public relations side.
"I prefer MIT/BSD licenses just because they're simpler"[0]
Seems like there is no real point, just vibes.
[0] https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36