If the people entrusted with gauging consensus among the technical community and merging non-controversial patches only would show signs of bad faith or try to

If the people entrusted with gauging consensus among the technical community and merging non-controversial patches only would show signs of bad faith or try to undermine the open consensus-driven process, the ecosystem would displace them with a new set of maintainers. You have to remember that at the end of the day, Bitcoin Core is only able to write code and propose it for adoption by the wider ecosystem. The only code that matters in practice is the one being ran by network nodes. As we're seeing with Classic/XT/Unlimited today, competing teams can indeed emerge and try to build community support to alternative protocols.