[kod]

But always protecting the maintainers' best interests over those of users or new contributors ultimately leads to the death of the project.

There's a fairly good chance the reason someone wrote that 10k line PR is because they actually understand the problem users are having, and you don't as a maintainer.

[valiant55]

Then fork and maintain the project yourself, or maintain it as an extension.

I'd argue the maintainers interests are the only ones that matter and the freedom of open source is that if you as a user don't like what's going on just fork.