Im not interested in wading into semantics and definition hell here, but Ill point out that Bitcoin Core has MANY (what Ill call) project champions.

fanquake has a vision and strong opinions about the build system

MarcoFalke and the CI

dergoegge and fuzz testing

glozow on many thing mempool and policy

pwuille and suhasdaftuar on cluster mempool

hhebasto owning Windows support, translations

SomsenRuben and josibake and silent payments

the_charlatan_ and the kernel project

0xB10C and monitoring

If you jump in on these projects, you'll be welcome to contribute with open arms, but you will feel the ownership, vision, and opinions of these folks on these initiatives.

But it isnt limited to just critical software engineering tasks that support at $2T magic internet money. Others do work on the Bitcoin protocol:

darosior and the great consensus cleanup

fjahr and work on cross input signature aggregation (CISA)

ajtowns leading a project creating a whole new script engine with Basic Bitcoin Lisp language (bll)

There are many more examples of such "leadership", initiative, and ownership within the project.

So when it comes down to it, the "leadership" criticism of Bitcoin Core isn't about developers taking initiative, or owning and championing projects. The criticism is quite narrow in scope:

Of the dozens of projects and initiatives across Bitcoin Core's codebase and the Bitcoin protocol that have champions, people are upset that there isn't a covenants champion.

That's it.

This is a fine and reasonable opinion to have. But to then generalize that the project has "no leadership" because no one is currently championing covenants is an unjustifiable claim.