I used to work at a company that held to the concept of “don’t be a hero.” Basically, if you were having to step up, work overtime, and always go out of your normal routine to “fix” stuff, then you’re actually enabling bad processes.
I think the same concept applies here. If you can’t let any code be submitted without personally reviewing it, then there is something wrong with either the review system, the onboarding system for new devs, or the continuous integration system that should be catching mistakes. Same goes for triaging: if no one is triaging because it’s too exhausting and leads to burnout, then some other system may need to be devised for handling outstanding issues.
Obviously this is much harder to deal with in an organization where most contributors are volunteers. But if we want the project to survive and not be taken over by corporations who can afford to pay people to deal with this stuff full time, I think it should be addressed in a different way.
You still see this same mindset now with people making things like blessed.rs. It’s the same idea, just not wrapped into a library. I find it hilarious when it gets shared in discussions and some people go “oh wow so helpful!”, as if we all couldn’t have found
serde
andrand
on crates.io without it.