> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author;

Says who? How can you say I'm categorically wrong when your entire point rests upon an opinion?

Says the definition? I don't really understand your response. A pull request is a request from Alice (the author) that one of Barbara, Chris, Daniel (the maintainers) should pull her code into a particular branch.

Many communities do have a norm that all authors are to be presumed equal, as long as they're prepared to take advice and learn from it. (That's where all experts start, after all.) That's the norm that Godot are trying to protect here. If they don't stop accepting AI-authored contributions, they worry, reviewers will start to implicitly load-shed by not reading PRs from people they don't recognize.