But the issue tracker is so overwhelmed by slop, non-Latin scripts, and people who think their personal problems (or AI model problems) are the product's problems, that the employees have all but ghosted the issue tracker and PRs; it takes days or weeks for the maintainers (employees) to triage/respond/despam the Github issues list. And if the employees _do_ leave an initial comment on a community PR that multiple users on the issue tracker are begging to be merged, and the PR author makes the requested changes or solves the roadblock, then the team never responds, or takes months to respond. Meanwhile main branch marches on - PRs from the internal paid dev team do get merged often.
I have to imagine that there's a layer of internal politics (maybe VC funding related? dunno) at these companies that shifts more and more communication onto internal nonpublic platforms, to the point where the open-source community rarely gets updates beyond patch notes. It certainly can feel strange when you're on the receiving end of a ghosting. One has to remember that "open-source" does not necessarily mean "community".