I was speaking less to the SQLite situation specifically and more to the general idea of "Could it be that this is precisely because they don't use "modern tool

I was speaking less to the SQLite situation specifically and more to the general idea of "Could it be that this is precisely because they don't use "modern tools" and accept outside contributions?" and how I think teams that are very small and not very accepting of outside help/influence might affect that. To that end I purposefully compares extremes, and tried to allude to the fact that most situations fall between those extremes in some way. SQLite is more towards one end than the other, but it's obviously not a single developer releasing binaries to the world, which is about as far to that extreme as you can go. The other end would probably be something like Debian. That's not to say either of those situations have to be horrible at what the other excels at. That singular person could have set things in place such that all their code and the history of it gets released on their death, and Debian obviously has a working process for releasing a high quality distribution.