Hiker explicitly says that his reason for leaving isn't because his goal was accomplished:

> > To be completely honest, the main reason for my departure was not that my goal of online races was reached. It is a matter or principle and professionalism. From my point of view a big change has gone through the development team, when new members were added and older members left. Let’s just say that the newer team members preferred to pursue a faster-paced development style with fewer reviews, less documentation, less oversight and a reduced need for consensus, and that our differences in approach could not be reconciled.

This was further discussed on Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/bpb44y/supert...

The link submitter above themselves had done a GSoC with the original team, and on the situation and the bit quoted above, all he had to say was ":/".

> When the original contributor left because they thought the game did what they wanted it to do,

Again, explicitly not what happened.

> I'm confused because reputable dev leads getting "bullied out of a project" seems like a 2000s thing which shouldn't exist after the proliferation of git where the repo is in theory decentralized, so nobody could without "commit access" like the CVS days of old. > > […] I'm not sure it's really a major sticking point if the new leader decided to be conservative about things...

It sounds to me like you are confused because you expect a technical solution to prevent social problems. Obviously, that doesn't really work, bullies still exist, and even if you fork it's still seen as a big, stressful, hostile action that most conflict-averse people would prefer to avoid doing.

From what I've seen, the new devs didn't decide to be uniformly conservative about things— They still posted on the forums with big plans now and then— But it's more that they compulsively let only their own contributions and drastic changes through.