Developers are increasingly voicing their opinions through their open source projects in active use by thousands of software applications and organizations. Most recently, the developer of the 'event-source-polyfill' npm package peacefully protested Russia's "unreasonable invasion" of Ukraine, to Russian consumers.
Also, Notepad++ is basically irrelevant now, with the rise in Atom and VSCode, as well as WSL making Vim and Emacs easier to use on Windows than ever before. I feel like part of their anti-China stuff is attention grabbing in desperate hopes of rekindling a userbase, as in “Oh, this text editor is against China? Goddamn, I’m against China! Guess I’ll download it then!”
Also on notepad++, it’s pretty damn sketchy.. So I’d steer clear. as you said better alternatives exist so why risk it?