he has been thinking about leaving for a year now and explained his reasons
https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.htmlmoving on
I realize I am myself somewhat of a centralized bottleneck. And although I find Bitcoin an extremely interesting project and believe it’s one of the most important things happening at the moment, I also have many other interests. It’s also particularly stressful and I don’t want it, nor the bizarre spats in the social media around it, to start defining me as a person.
being a guy that(under the maintainer job description) just merges a certain brands codebase into a compiled EXE release candidate is not "honorary doctorate" worthy.
many devs wrote more lines of code and done many more things. and some other coders found lots of bugs and errors and reported, offered fixes and debugged the bugs.
trying to put certain devs into a hierarchy and then reward them for the privilege of such a central model is not something that should be rewarded
even wlad himself admits that he does not like what became of the group he was maintainer of