> the amount of drama around Rust seems to be something unseen among open source projects before.
Bless your heart. The modern world is tame and blissful in comparison to the world of the 90's. Then, most projects could be individually maintained and so treated their drama with public forks of source code and shrieking on mailing lists. We who lived through that remember the ejection of Theo from NetBSD and the resulting fork of OpenBSD, the XFree86/Xorg fork, the gcc/egcs fork, emacs/xemacs, the list goes on and on.
Today, most major maintainers are employed by name brand corporations to do their work, which highly constrains the amount of drama to "stuff that doesn't embarrass your boss". So board-level end-arounds like the linked article is all we get. It used to be much more personal.
Well, it existed for quite a long time before drama started, it was just one or two episodes, and was relatively short-lived. I haven't heard anything about Linux in that regard for quite a while, but Rust is in the news regularly. Linux kernel also has a much larger community.
Is it that BDFL-based governance just works better, or do people have higher expectations from Rust community than from, say, Linux one?