> We're supposed to implicitly trust this person

That would be rather foolish even with a fully viewable history.

I don't understand why you're so worked up about this—nobody is forcing you to use the code.

I think there are 3 levels at play here. One is code as curation, a model I'm not particularly interested in. Clearly the publisher, despite not being paid, is a supplicant. and as a curator I'm as much or more interested the in process being used and the longetivity of the code base.

The second is code as artifact. Is this code useful, performant, with a reasonable API.

The third is code as concept, or architecture. This is really what interests me here. I use explicit allocators any time I can get away with it, and it's an excellent tool for involved systems projects. I'm not really interested in using this code, but having implemented these things many times, looking at how other people made the various tradeoffs, how it all came together, is really valuable input for when I'm going to do this again. Maybe there are some really brand new ideas here.

While I'm unsympathetic to the first perspective, it's valid. But I don't think its fair to castigate someone who put something on GitHub for not meeting someones adoption criteria.