One other concern that is important here is that if the need or desire to litigate the license ever occurs, inability to clearly show ownership hampers an effective argument (or at least makes it less clear) and might make the license terms expensive or impossible to enforce. As copyright owner, it's your decision about whether and on what terms you want to participate in a project, but the project does get to decide on what terms it requires of contributors. I'd argue that a strong reluctance to share one's work under fairly common terms in the Open Source community only means that you're not a good candidate for working on such projects. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I should also mention that there is another remedy to that concern (which I don't necessarily agree is that big of one) is another cultural component of the OSS world: forking. If the party you assigned your copyright to (and remember this would almost always be to a project not an individual), you have the option to carry on (or lobby for other developers to carry on) the project from that point under the GPL, one of whose main points is to guarantee your right to do that. Given the way the community would tend to react to such an attempt, a forked project would almost certainly end up being the new de facto standard.

Hi! I want to respond to you personally, because we did have someone raise a bit of hell about our CAA for these reasons. They did not have any contributed code, however. They were just a vocal third party.

In the end, if they have opposition to the CAA, they don't sign it, and we make sure that we don't merge pull requests whose contributors have not signed the CAA.

You have a moral opposition to the concept of the CAA or a CLA, and that's perfectly fine, it just means you will not be able to contribute to NodeBB. Unfortunate, but our butts are protected and your rights are not potentially infringed upon.