[belorn]

The standard approach is to let the maintainer make all decision in their own supported packages. This works in 99.99% of the time and if someone else wants to do the work of supporting a package then there are always alternatives. Being asked to do the work of supporting a whole package is generally a rather large commitment and Debian developers tend to be busy enough that fighting over being the maintainer of larger packages isn't that common, especially if the contention is over a small thing.

That is how things get done. If you do the work you get to decide.

In the 0.001% that an issue get taken up by the technical committee as being important for the whole project, then after usually a long time they make a decision that in special cases may overrule the maintainer. That happens about once or twice a year? I am unsure how often a decision actually goes against the maintainer, and there is only a few cases a year (https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte).

This naturally doesn't stop anyone from being too active on the mailing lists and arguing over small things, but I would think people are wasting less time there than they do arguing lesser important topics on social media.