Step 1. Helpful person starts committing useful PRs and offers to help out until they get commit rights. I don’t think this is hard to achieve generally.
Step 2. Organised campaign of grumpy users complaining about how poorly the software is being maintained along with a bunch of pile-ons.
Step 3. Benign committer decides it’s all too much and quits. The general feeling that open source committers are undervalued makes this more likely.
Step 4. Supply chain attack by new evil committer.
Call me when they complete the human trials