I think this criticism doesn't go far enough. As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980503 says, the criticism appears to be more about governance than succession. But then, the next sentence after your quote is:

> Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers.

To me, this makes it abundantly clear that the goal is to associate leadership the author doesn't like with politics the author doesn't like. It's in a "behold, Goofus and Gallant" style of diatribe that I've seen a few times before and it always rubs me the wrong way.

Yes, a lot of FOSS projects have seen friction between the official leadership[1] and major players in the community. But it seems to come in three major forms: the kind where the conflict is expected and part of how those people have gotten along historically for years[2]; the kind where the players are trying to stage a coup because they don't like the leadership's { real-world politics, social status, opinion of pineapple on pizza, ... } expressed entirely outside of development spaces; and the kind where the project is already forked but at least one party can't leave the other alone (sometimes because the project is really more about infrastructure/platform than software; sometimes because leadership kicked someone out, in an inverse of the previous situation).

But swipes like the above instantly throw out all nuance and good will, and effectively round everything off to "all these bad things happen because some people just can't behave themselves, which conveniently correlates with a caricature of my own political adversaries".

1. There are plenty of cases showing that moving away from the BDFL model doesn't actually fix the problem.

2. Believe it or not, many people actually enjoy operating that way. I hold that people who don't have no business telling people who do to cut it out.