kd-11 was fine, the criticisms is mostly directed at "the main dev" nekotekina. Go through the git history of the last 4~ years. It's not amazing or impressive by any stretch of the imagination.
hmm, the Patreon claims ($4k/m) is to support both of those developers "full-time". I have to agree the commit history (for both) seems a bit thin. Although not to the point it's alarming or anything, as work is being done. I'm also well aware that's not always the best measure of contributions to software. Especially given the high-quality work going into documentation on this blog...
A fair bit of this would be testing, reverse engineering, etc.
If you look at the commit history of any of the devs where I work, it'd look a bit thin too, but we're all working 8+ hours / day.
Once an emulator gets fairly polished, it's not unusual to spend a week or two on a bug to discover you need to add one bitwise and to mask a couple of bits out of a value somewhere.