Dazed and confused

Speaking here as someone who has been involved in trying to get the governance issues resolved for the past 5 or so years (it's been ongoing for much longer than it might seem publicly), the fundamental problem at the root of all this is that project governance failed to take warnings and complaints from the community seriously. The default response to any and all reports of issues with governance/communication/coordination/etc. within the project was to either ignore the issue or trivialize it, with the tone of "I'm sure it'll all work out".

Notably this was originally just a problem with things like documentation, accessibility for new contributors, glacially slow reviews, and so on. It only started revolving around moderation and, eventually, the involvement of arms dealers much later, once the popularity of the project spiked and a large influx of new people started. But because the root problem of laissez-faire governance was never addressed, the project never had any infrastructure in place to deal with these much more complicated problems once they became relevant.

There are a lot of details around specific bad decisions by specific people, specific problematic personalities, and so on; but ultimately those details don't really matter, the refusal of (the various forms of) governance to make decisions in response to problems and commit to them has always been at the root of all of these issues. And eventually all the built-up frustrations around "nothing is happening, everything feels immovable" explode publicly. To a point where the specific frustrations and policy views almost don't matter anymore.