I actually think things are a lot less rocky these days - nothing in Michael Stapelberg's post is new, it's just a difference of scale and perhaps the developer

I actually think things are a lot less rocky these days - nothing in Michael Stapelberg's post is new, it's just a difference of scale and perhaps the developer population getting a bit older and more committed to their day jobs. There are a lot of things helping with scale: Alioth (running a fork of SourceForge's code) was replaced with Salsa (running GitLab), which effectively collapsed the options for version control from CVS, SVN, Git, Darcs, etc. to just Git. Debhelper 9 standardized a ton of workflows. Team maintenance is a lot more common than individual maintenance, and uploading packages owned by unresponsive maintainers has gotten a lot more socially acceptable. But a lot of the old problems have scaled more quickly than solutions: if you're doing an archive-wide change, there are more packages you need to touch, more people you need to contact, etc., so each old problem happens more. (I also don't think any of the problems in that post are about developers being disagreeable or argumentative - just about Debian having a lot of technical debt and no easy way to pay it down.)