Where would you expect to see this drama unfold if it were private? Nowhere? That'd be incredible opsec.

Code review happens in public, not on GitHub but on Gerrit. The main issue tracker is public, on GitHub. Proposals are largely handled on the issue tracker. There are public mailing lists, etc.

Surely, there are face to face private meetings. And there are likely also private issue trackers, mailing lists, and etc. And, yes, sometimes, a seemingly arbitrary decision pops up, that was clearly discussed elsewhere.

But these comments seem to come from people who never even tried to contribute, or deal with the process.

I've done docs fixes as a total newb, had to convince the Windows maintainer to let me fix a Windows issue (that a year later produced flaky tests, which I fixed), made and got a proposal accepted, have a project in the linkname hall-of-shame, which led to another successful proposal to open up APIs (which then failed tests on some platforms, which I fixed).

All with little drama, pure engineering.