Good call-out. Last year I spent a month to read every single known message from Satoshi and I do recall this. He was worried the attention from the government could kill the project at an early stage, but we are beyond that fear now. To your point about the project not being his, it’s true that the project has been passed on to new maintainers. But I’ve been thinking deeply about future threats to bitcoin and a big one is the threat of a fragmentation over a future controversial code change. That’s why it will become important to ossify the source code by getting people to treat the code as sacred (inspired by a divine prophet) which is how religions protected their texts from being mutated.