I just checked the repo[0], and it says Bram has authored 95% of all commits to Vim. To say "the community owns Vim" when they've done ~5% of the work reminds me of group projects in school where one person does all the work and everyone else claims credit.
For a while Bram would copy paste all proposed changes from other peoples branches to his own branches and therefore giving himself the git-blame for the code. I think only recently he started allowing other people to actually maintain the repo.
I'm not sure this is because no one wants to contribute. I think it's more because Moolenar prefers to do the work himself, and doesn't like to accept much in the way of contributions from others. He's certainly allowed to run his project that way, but I can see why it might turn some people off.
Which is yet again contrasted with how NeoVim runs things and the 824 contributors to the repository at time of writing. I believe that justinmk, one of the principal drivers of the project specifically stated that he doesn't want to be something like a BDFL and I assume that's also pretty much a reaction to Vim.
One is not a better parent by controlling their kids for their foreseeable future. One needs to let them join the world and grow on their own, with their own friends.
It’s true that anyone can fork the code. But splitting the user community and plugin ecosystem with forks should be a last resort. This discussion is about how a FOSS community can improve software while avoiding forks that result in incompatible code-bases.
