ignoring the topic creators rants about racial politics
ignoring the topic creators rants about government agents
..
bitcoin development does however have a close-nit centralised group
its called core for MANY reasons
they declared it the only reference and new rule proposal source
where by other brands have to shadow follow core
the core group declared themselves the sole arbiters of bitcoin protocol changes. where anyone opposing their roadmap is to be defined as enemies of bitcoin even when the debate is the small group central point of failure
even some EX core devs have admitted core are a central point of failure
including the top(maintainer) for the last 5 years Wladimir van der Laan
they have pushed in "features" to by-pass the byzantine generals solution called consensus and this to has been admitted by such devs that merged in the changes
done using "backward compatible, "mandated" changes without needing majority nodes to upgrade pre activation to support the slid in new features/rules. which is a security risk
activating a new rule without mass node readiness to understand/validate new ruled data is a security risk as it weakens data integrity
this core group are a hierarchy, they have censored moderation where anyone opposing them or even having a critique are removed or banned. which is not the path of their so called "open peer review"
yes there are some low hanging fruit contributors who do spell checks/translations/reviews and acknowledgements just to get their name credit on releases. but these small time contributors are not the main coders of new features
the main coders of new features are also the ones with merge capability so in short they merge in their own plans, while removing and ignoring outsiders idea's
though github is not the place to debate the "team" dynamics/centralisation.. it appears neither is the development boards of this forum nor the development IRC nor the mailing list. becasue they do not like open peer review they simply want their roadmap followed at all costs
or to put it simply
The org is only to prevent random contributors from uploading unauthorized code to Bitcoin Core and related projects. That is also the reason why the branches are protected - for instance, I contributed code to Bitcoin Core, but I can't just upload whatever I like because only the Bitcoin organization can do that (which is strictly limited to merging pull requests).
but to expand
those with merge and commit privilege are not just some randomly chosen people. they are known to be following a certain roadmap of corporate sponsored design
bitcoins natural design was "sole custody" yet the main features of bitcoin in the last 5 years are co-custody, group custody features which supposedly meant to offer greater tx count per block(more availability to transact on chain), but never prospers as a solution to allow more sole custody opportunity on the bitcoin network
now ill say it again many devs within core have admitted about the central point of failure of core and have tried to split up the core control. but as of yet, its been a long 5 years with little to no results that have helped bitcoin be what it was suppose to be
alot of work still needs to be done