In late stage projects there's often a cabal of passive aggressive people in charge who basically use management tactics to stay in power.

One of the tactics is to never directly respond to actual issues and ignore everything that the cabal cannot be bothered with.

Which is what incites anger in honest people in the first place and leaves them vulnerable to being cancelled.

I don't if this is the case here, but this is the reality in other projects. Whether cabal members are the actual top contributors or have any valuable ideas is left as an exercise to the reader.