> Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?

They know how to play the game 100x better than you do, and you don't want to waste your time learning to play the game at their level.

There is a Wikipedia rule for everything, and for the opposite of that, if you know the right buzzwords. If a "good guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's great, because he is a subject-matter expert; we need more heroes like him. If a "bad guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's a conflict of interest, instant revert and ban. You can accuse people of all kinds of bad behaviors, but if anyone does the same to you, you accuse them of not assuming good faith. You need to be very very patient and diplomatic, because if you lose temper even for a moment, you get banned. Shameless lying is perfectly okay if you stay polite and pretend to be too dumb to understand.

Basically this. They literally devote their entire lives to playing this game.

They would make for effective politicians if they could translate what they do beyond wikitext.

you have described my experience very accurately