I’m glad you asked. This is the first giveaway: the Knots repo is 1923 commits behind Core. You can argue it’s not essential and that older versions of Core are compatible and in consensus. Which is correct. But it’s the 1757 commits that are ahead of Core that are concerning. Who do you think has enough time and energy to review them all? Bitcoin Core is already difficult to review and takes months to consider every update. Knots has 1 guy who lost 200 BTC, a bunch of unreliable volunteers and an army of cheerleaders who are in a position of absolute trust. As more divergent code gets added under what looks like the benevolent dictatorship of one guy, it will get much worse. It only takes one bad mistake to cause a split. And Ocean will be the only pool mining the new chain. Good luck with that!

GitHub

GitHub - bitcoinknots/bitcoin: Bitcoin Knots enhanced Bitcoin node/wallet software

Bitcoin Knots enhanced Bitcoin node/wallet software - bitcoinknots/bitcoin

From my experience of working across multiple branches, these divergences in commits have a tendency to be the same code, but merged manually or differently. I have a suspicion that these commit metrics are a faulty heuristic on which to base your fears.

A more reliable tool would be to audit the diffs across the repos to see exactly how divergent they are from each other.