You cannot have it both ways, if you create an org on GitHub, a website, speak as a team "we"... seeing adoption will bring some expectations from your users and contributors, that are typically not just to beat other frameworks at TechEmpower benchmarks. I don't think many people want to use a performance experiment.
To be clear, I'm sure he also received a lot of unwarranted criticism, but that happens everywhere. It doesn't justify being hostile to legit contributions.
These mofos from Reddit who storm a GitLab ticket after it was posted there usually do not actually contribute to Open Source projects. They are pseudos who run their mouth but don't do the work. They are the ones who set up the wiki, but never write a single line of code.
Because from my perception it was more of the "unsafe Rust code is the devil community", which wasn't really using actix much beforehand. With that as a background you would be "punishing" the project for actions outside their core community (and control).