So why did I say it? Because it's consistent with what I've always said:  you cannot run a codebase like Wikipedia. Maintainers have to take part in debates, and then make a decision, and anyone else who was delegated commit access for robustness or convenience must then respect that decision. It's the only way to keep a project making progress at a reasonable pace.

This is not a radical position. That's how nearly all coding projects work. I have been involved with open source for 15 years and the 'single maintainer who makes decisions' model is normal, even if in some large codebases  subsystems have delegated submaintainers.

This is also how all my own projects are run. Bitcoinj has multiple people with commit access. Regardless, if there were to be some design dispute or whatever, I wouldn't tolerate the others with commit access starting some kind of Wiki-style edit war in the code if they disagreed. Nor would I ever expect to get my own way in other people's projects by threatening to revert the maintainers changes.

Core is in the weird position where there's no decision making ability at all, because anyone who shows up and shouts enough can generate 'controversy', then Wladimir sees there is disagreement and won't touch the issue in question. So it just runs and runs and anyone with commit access can then block any change.

I realise some people think this anti-process leads to better decision making. I disagree. It leads to no decision making, which is not the same thing at all.