With secret voting you can deflect responsibility and not really hold anybody accountable, with a benevolent dictator... er, well it can't be anybody but Linus' fault as all decisions flow through him.
That is fundamentally different from what the parent reply is saying and that makes no sense either. The entire point of putting open source code out there for free with no warranty is to avoid accountability, in favor of more transparency. A BDFL is only legally accountable to those who pay their salary, and the companies that care about accountability will pay them in exchange for signing private long-term contracts.
