Lets compare two projects that are collaborations:

Linux and Wayland.

Both are collaborative efforts, one has fairly effective and tyrannical leadership with the best interests of the community in mind. The other is lead by committee with competing interests and goals where they all have veto power.

Those same collaborators are reflected in the distro situation... Here is a group that also has some rather tyrannical leadership but they have dependencies (see the software they run) and some of those folks are sick of the distro's maintainers nonsense, and went to things like flat packs (see Bottles for an example).

> most managers think the way to solve IT problems is just to trow more people / more money

Leadership vs Management, a tale as old as time.