To me, this displays a deep misunderstanding of FOSS on the part of this projects maintainer. He wants to create a project, promote that project to the top of it's field, and completely ignore the perception of his userbase. Then he fell back on "it's my code I'll do what I want with it." That would be fine, but he "sold" people on this code with the understanding that we were all going to take it to it's maximum potential. This was marketed as something which would solve specific needs better than similar products. Most people can handle regression and bugs and regular ongoing refactors as everyone struggles to bring this same piece of code to the next level. What people, especially the dev community, cannot overcome is when they are told that a project has a direction that it clearly doesn't have. If this maintainer had no intention of accepting feedback from his users there should have been a clear indication of that somewhere in the docs.
If you never reconcile your reasoning and expectations with your community then they will deduce reasoning and expectations that you never implied. This maintainer wanted to produce a popular piece of software not to contribute to the Rust community, or because he wanted to make lives easier. This isn't the attitude of someone who is trying to improve his skills or challenge his knowledge of Rust. He obviously didn't do it to get rich. I believe he made actix-web to get famous. He wanted blind recognition for being selfless. He wanted a community of docile dependents who sit up late on GH hitting the refresh button waiting for his next push. He seems to have only wanted to make a product that people revered. When that didn't happen because he never reconciled his goals with the communities expectations he took his ball and went home. "What??? No fame? No glory? Criticism!?!? Fine, no soup for you."
If you never reconcile your reasoning and expectations with your community then they will deduce reasoning and expectations that you never implied. This maintainer wanted to produce a popular piece of software not to contribute to the Rust community, or because he wanted to make lives easier. This isn't the attitude of someone who is trying to improve his skills or challenge his knowledge of Rust. He obviously didn't do it to get rich. I believe he made actix-web to get famous. He wanted blind recognition for being selfless. He wanted a community of docile dependents who sit up late on GH hitting the refresh button waiting for his next push. He seems to have only wanted to make a product that people revered. When that didn't happen because he never reconciled his goals with the communities expectations he took his ball and went home. "What??? No fame? No glory? Criticism!?!? Fine, no soup for you."