It's an open source project, they could've forked it and got their wish to keep the API unaffected by any changes to SQLite. This blog post[1], this amazing blog post gives us all the insight needed to know this was going to go badly. The bit about whiteboarding a replacement, is that better or worse than believing Javascript is really a replacement for SQL? Or that IndexedDB is somehow elegant? I can't tell, the whole thing makes me cringe.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...