This thread has probably run its course, and newer postings[1] have more information, but I'll respond anyway if it's helpful...

> How can they remove maintainers from their own projects? If my project is yawaramin/foobar...

The official RubyGems projects in question were under a GitHub organizational account, not a single user's account. A subset of the maintainers had the "owner" flag on the org. One of those folks basically initiated the takeover. See [2] for a more detailed recounting.

[1]: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390 - September 2025 (107+ comments)

[2]: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/#the-takeover