The constant stream of little quips and inside jokes that endear you and I to things also can be off-putting and drive outsiders away. I am sorry but I've spent my years explaining so many strange things that nobody understands like "Guru Meditation," and it's not really funny any more when you have to keep explaining the joke. And those are just the little innocent gags, it's much much worse when the joke is disparaging someone.

It also doesn't seem like this was written by some random open source contributor, it seems it was done by the maintainers, who are being paid to work on it by their patrons. They absolutely do have to answer to those patrons. While people seem to like to assign all blame for things on twitter commentators for whatever reason, it's likely the actions they took are the result of feedback from the patrons.