You’re right, the only thing preventing what you’re saying is the community keeping the leaders in check. But the leaders have way more influence individually t

You’re right, the only thing preventing what you’re saying is the community keeping the leaders in check. But the leaders have way more influence individually than each community member does, so if one with git access to the Core repo is compromised by the CIA let’s say, they can nefariously push for changes that seem innocuous but actually benefit some entity with deep pockets. And most of the community doesn’t review each line of code that gets changed.