"one person made a premature announcement of what they wanted" -- meaning the pumpking who managed the last few releases of Perl? Talk about setting someone up. So much second-guessing by armchair pumpkings. People like Matt Trout who just lob verbal grenades are the problem here, not people like Sawyer who was simply trying to do the job he was volunteering for (didn;t see anyone else step up to relieve him...)

"meaning the pumpking who managed the last few releases of Perl? Talk about setting someone up. So much second-guessing by armchair pumpkings."

I don't think anyone is disputing who said what here, unless I very much misunderstand what you are telling me. In terms of "armchair pumpkings" I don't really follow this analogy. A manager makes an announcement about product X, the people who actually build product X have some issues with what was announced. This does not seem on the surface as something I'd describe as unreasonable. I've heard/read tale (here and elsewhere) that repeat attempts to explain such problems by people who are building product X were ignored by the manager. Without spending the time to go through all of the public conversations about this (I just don't have the time, and these days it's all over the place), for someone not directly involved it's difficult to see the big picture as a whole. Given the way of the world the last year or so, and the situation with perl related things in general (as previously touched on) I can 100% believe that burnout, COVID/lockdown related fatigue is a serious thing, and all of the impacts on mental health that go along with it.

Update: On the last point I'm reminded of one of my favorite moments in TPC Glasgow Developers, engineers and the downward spiral‎ - Christopher Rasch-Olsen Raa.

Other takes on this A year of strife in Perl - Leon Timmermans, Grinnz adds their perspective in a reddit thread.