The title is slightly misleading - the author mostly critiques the maintainer model used by Linux, not the broader model of "maintainer" used in OSS.

Speaking from personal experience as a somewhat new maintainer for a large project (we were #3 in PRs for all of GitHub last year[1]), modern tooling and aggressive automation decrease the amount of busywork substantially. I also have a relatively large amount of independence in my decisions as a maintainer, but this hasn't translated into an absence of oversight or fractured quality standards.

[1]: https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/analyzing-github-pull-request...