I agree with the rest of your comment but I just want to respond to this part:

>If you don't have thick skin, you should probably avoid upstream discussions

I have a humble request, please discontinue this attitude on your own projects and please encourage other upstreams to also discontinue it. I'm baffled as to why so many open source maintainers seem to confuse needing to defend technical decisions with "having a thick skin," they are not the same. It's perfectly possible to be opinionated and strongly scrutinize a technical decision, while also not being harsh and rude towards the person presenting it. If you believe those mailing lists are unsalvageably hostile, then in my opinion, they should just be shut down. That's not the kind of place to have official project communication.