Well fwiw, all of those people are no longer involved in the project.
I did some digging and have been able to find basically everything. I'm keeping it to myself. No dirty laundry here.
Also if pidgin could magically combine slack, messenger, telegram, discord, and Whatsapp in a single reasonable app ... It'd be a return to the glory days. The current state of half a dozen web apps is such a pain. Just text chat. Nothing fancy.
What a dream...
I use this ansible role to deploy it: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/