Initially I liked the idea, but the more I think about it the more this feels like it just boils down to: only allow contributions from a list of trusted people.

Well a lot of useful things are not useful because they are innovative, but well designed an executed.

It's similar to old Usenet "killfiles" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file

...or spam "RBL" lists which were often shared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System_blocklist

This makes a lot more sense for large scale and high profile projects, and it eliminates low quality slop PRs by default with the contributors having to earn the trust of the core maintainers to contribute directly to the project.