I thought it was obvious you wouldn’t say “hey I just took your benchy model and changed N vertices”. But just “happened” to inadvertently create a benchy lookalike.

Also there is definitely a point where it would be safe to reproduce the benchy design otherwise we could point at anything on earth and say “that’s a heavily modified benchy.”

Or are we all benchy? Am I a benchy with a thousand modified vertices?

So let’s be pragmatic there is nothing preventing me even to start a new design that vaguely ressemble the Benchy design. All it takes is for that “vaguely” to be enough so that you could argue you were not making a benchy redesign but just stumbled on something that could look Like a benchy.