That's a bit of an overstatement; it's responsible for very few technical decisions in Debian, and doesn't normally have even a theoretical ultimate-decision-ma

That's a bit of an overstatement; it's responsible for very few technical decisions in Debian, and doesn't normally have even a theoretical ultimate-decision-maker role of regularly reviewing or steering them. Their only role is technical dispute-resolution, and they are supposed to wade into even that as minimally as possible. Most technical decisions are made by a mixture of individual package maintainers, the Debian Project Leader and release-management team, and informal consensus-building. To the extent there's an "ultimate" technical decision-maker, I would say for the majority of issues, the release team working with the project leader functions in that role.