No, the ability to define the accounts and their balances is already present in upstream ganache-cli.
The way that solidity-coverage was implemented required changes in ethereumjs-vm, and that implied changes in ganache-cli, which uses the former. This ended up propagating as changes in all of these packages, which gave the name to the sc-forks GitHub org. The project was abandoned for a while and that’s why we had to create our own fork to update it with support for some of the new opcodes (from Byzantium I think).
I believe the original developer of solidity-coverage is working on a new version that will not require all of these forks, and we will probably migrate to that as soon as it’s usable. The current setup is a pain to maintain. It’s safe to use it, in fact it probably has the most features among the alternatives, but it can be a painful experience if something doesn’t work. 