They already publish on F-Droid. It sounds like it was just a lot of built-up frustration from the last several years of Google blocking apps that require storage permissions and making it difficult to get restored to the Play store.
This was the bug from the last removal. They were going back and forth with Google unproductively for months. Hopefully the existing fork (which was also taken down from the Play store) can keep going on F-Droid.
That and the shrinking ability to grant access to device storage. If that becomes an option only on rooted phones (which seems like the directly Google is heading) it will make the audience for such an app much smaller.