I think it is reasonable to have a higher (or at least, different) standard for Emacs core than for packages.

I also feel compelled to say that I personally think a lot of what has brought more energy into Emacs world recently is treesit and eglot becoming widely available in distributions, neither of which involved any AI

These are orthogonal:

- there are people who do not want LLM contributions being accepted into emacs itself (legal, maintainers burnout, etc reasons)

- there are projects (such as gptel, pi-coding-agent) that enable LLM usage from within emacs

Both may be true at the same time.