Agreed. The level of aggressive gatekeepers is just crazy, take Linux ARM mailing list for example. I found the Central and Eastern Europeans particularly aggressive there and I'm saying this as on myself. They sure do like to feel special there, with very little soft skills.

In the small, it's still a meritocracy. A patch like this is obviously correct and I expect to get in first try (maybe with a formatting fix by the maintainer).

For large works, the burden shifts, since you are increasing the maintenance load. Now we have the question of who will do the future work, and that requires judgement of the importance of the work and/or the author, and hence is a fundamentally political question.

This will likely be alleviated when Ai first projects take over as important OSS projects.

Fir these projects everything "tribal" has to be explicitly codified.

On a more general note: this is likely going to have a rather big impact on software in general - the "engineer to company can not afford to loose" is likely loosing their moat entirely.