Comment by rincebrain

His complaint is, in essence, that people will block technical proposals for nontechnical reasons, and that attempts to resolve this result in people complaining that you're talking about nontechnical things at all.

Few people like dealing with interpersonal conflict. They want to think that technical meritocracy wins the arguments.

But in that discussion, a maintainer said "I am going to try to sabotage this because I hate it.", and there's no technical argument to resolve that. And there's not really any route other than escalation to some kind of authority if there's not a common negotiation baseline.

"You can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into."