The issue here is the attackers will quickly move away from an individual attacking you to the group attacking you. The person writing the infected code will never be a jerk to you at all. You'll just suddenly see a huge portion of your mailing list move against you ever so slightly.

We've complained about bots in social media for a long time, but how many people in open source discussions are shady manipulative entities?

But in this case he was getting hit by both someone willing to help and then multiple people complaining that things were taking too long. And when you yourself feel like things are taking too long then you’re probably more susceptible to all this.

That sounds nice.

I did an engineering/program manager role for 8 years and people pretty much always did what I asked if I showed up at their desk or bothered their boss.

"Squeaky wheel gets the grease?"

But I too like to think that I prioritize my children on merit rather than fuss level. For some reason they continue to cry despite me claiming I don't react to it.

True, but a determined adversary like JiaTan/Jugar has an ace up their sleeve: they are good enough, and patient enough, to be able to fork the base project, spend a year or two making it better than the original (releasing the head of steam built up from legitimate requests that the old, overworked maintainer never got too, building goodwill in the process) and then convincing the distros to pick up their fork instead of the older original. At which point it really is game over.