I'm not sure why it's like this. If you look at the real world, you have stuff like ggml, which is about as hardcore as it gets in the LLM space, and it was made buy just a guy. Same for this like ComfyUI

If you get enough academics in a place, they tend to close rank, and not let anyone in without the same credentials. Data science used to be like this, they were constantly on about how you need a Math Phd to even apply, yet when I met these guys IRL, most of them were just running Python math libraries.

These previous examples show that if you understand at least a part of the problem space, you can 100% contribute without academic credentials.