Perhaps we can get at a deeper, more durable insight if we assume for a moment that most individual actors are well-intentioned, and that the described vitriol on one side and perceived stubbornness on the other is an externality of the unfortunate incentives (or lack thereof) that are parasitic on the open source community.
It's almost instinctual/natural to misjudge the popularity of any project for some false sense of security or acceptance. Just think about the numerous issues that plagued the Node community around NPM packages with large amounts of downloads and GitHub stars that turned out to be problematic.
For me the deeper insight here is that we all sort of want our cake and eat it too. Project maintainers/owners want the freedom and enjoyment of working in open source building fun and useful things without any explicit commitments, and that's fair and understandable especially without any formal compensation. And the users want to be able to have access to a growing collection of projects without having much skin in the game, i.e. paying for it.
This isn't a problem with people, this is a problem innate to open source, and the double-edged sword that it is.
You're right in the sense that, at the end of the day, almost every organizational/social structure is made of people. The interesting thing for me is to see what incentive structures are at play that incentivize otherwise good people to do apparently bad things.
We can think about these larger, emergent structures like programming language and open source communities independently of the individuals that comprise them.
It's almost instinctual/natural to misjudge the popularity of any project for some false sense of security or acceptance. Just think about the numerous issues that plagued the Node community around NPM packages with large amounts of downloads and GitHub stars that turned out to be problematic.
For me the deeper insight here is that we all sort of want our cake and eat it too. Project maintainers/owners want the freedom and enjoyment of working in open source building fun and useful things without any explicit commitments, and that's fair and understandable especially without any formal compensation. And the users want to be able to have access to a growing collection of projects without having much skin in the game, i.e. paying for it.
This isn't a problem with people, this is a problem innate to open source, and the double-edged sword that it is.