LLMs might be part of why Ladybird is making this decision, but they aren’t the only possible one: SQLite, for example, has been developed this way pretty much forever. To each their own, I guess.

Lua is the same IIRC: open source but not open development.

It’s MIT licensed, and the maintainers are always grateful for bug reports, but all the code in the project was written by just 3 people.

Yeah I don't see the big deal here. Some of the best software is made and maintained by a very small group of dedicated folks. It's a perfectly reasonable move to protect their time and project.