FWIW, I can see how it might sound compelling, but as @schmidty also mentions, responding to these fables takes a lot of time, and “if you argue with a fool, from a distance people can’t tell who is who”. Beyond just being selective in what evidence the thread shows, it is actively misrepresenting some things.
I listed the ACKs for the two nominations above, but also linked the chats and PRs for you to read yourself. The point that I was trying to make was that summarizing Gloria’s PR as "NACKed" and Vasil’s PR as "broadly supported" doesn’t match up with the facts and looks silly in comparison to the other nominations. I also provided evidence that calling Gloria’s PR rushed is similarly silly.
"Dimov built Core's privacy networking from the ground up" is an exaggeration. Tor support was added in 2016 with Bitcoin Core 0.12.0 by Mara van der Laan. She also authored BIP155 in 2019. It looks like Carl Dong had started implementing BIP155 before Vasil took that over and finished it. To be clear, Dimov did do quite some work there: beyond finishing work on BIP155, Dimov added I2P and CJDNS, and put in a lot of work for the new privatebroadcast feature. Just saying that Hodlonaut probably didn’t even check that claim before making it.
Regarding "prearranged" maintainer nominations: the regular contributors are a small group that works in the same workspace (the repository), but is loosely organized. People who are regularly active in the repo know who the most active contributors and reviewers are, but stretching out some feelers before nominating someone for maintainer is just common sense. Nominating people who then might not have support for it is prone to create disgruntlement.
FWIW, I can see how it might sound compelling, but as @schmidty also mentions, responding to these fables takes a lot of time, and “if you argue with a fool, from a distance people can’t tell who is who”. Beyond just being selective in what evidence the thread shows, it is actively misrepresenting some things.