Trezor team had to come out publicly and show people how Coinkite took their code for Coldcard and tried to pass it off as if they wrote the code. That really happened, you just probably weren't around at the time.

I don’t consider it ethical to take someone else’s code (open source or closed source) to spin up a direct competitor and profit from the original’s authors work IMO not much different than Chinese companies stealing IP/trade secrets from American companies to make cheap knock-offs

This is not what happened, You're parroting influencers and NVK.