What is preventing someone just forking ETH when it merges?

Hello,

I was discussing eth with a friend of mine sharing how awesome eth will be once its POS and after merge. Even discussing and trying to promote it so we can stake and win more eth.

My friend however has some questions that I can't really answer, can anyone more knowledgeable help out?
Our question revolves around forking ETH and people simply continuing mining the fork. I know about the difficulty bomb and that at some point ETH will stall and die with ever increasing block times. However as my friend states what prevents a group of big money shots having a huge mining operation in the millions simply hiring developers (or themselves) to remove the difficulty bomb, after all its just a piece of code its somewhere there in the source code on ETH on Githib a team can find it and simply remove it.
I know it won't the original ETH but if miners continue to support this potential fork, and there is a team capable to remove the bomb it can continue living on its own and even have some developers working on it.