That's exactly it. As someone else in this comment section described, there's "clout" from being the maintainer of a popular library and this particular action

That's exactly it. As someone else in this comment section described, there's "clout" from being the maintainer of a popular library and this particular action could be seen as "clout-chasing". It's terrible that clout is such a thing in open-source, but there are complex incentive issues that led to this point.