So this is not some grieving random person from crowd - Chas is a person whose libraries and contributions I value tremendously and he certainly made LOTS of contributions to clojure OSS landscape for free and out of his good will as well. So ultimately this feels like your parents are arguing (which is never a good thing) - you like them both and you just want the arguing to stop and you just want everybody to live together in harmony. But here you go, Chas has moved away from clojure now. And I have to say I am very sorry to see him go.
It seems that way? To me, it seems like a reasonable response to how many people treat any kind of volunteer-led effort.
For example, I help mod a fairly popular subreddit, r/cscareerquestions. Now, we don't have a problem with people suggesting changes to sub rules or have meta discussions and even complaints. No community is perfect, the mods certainly aren't, etc.
However, the vast majority of complaints are of the completely useless variety. They're the vague one-liners -- "this sub used to be good, and is now bad for generic reasons I will not elaborate on" -- that usually have no clear basis in reality, nor any practical solutions even to the extent they're true.
And when I try to earnestly engage with people who have the most upvoted complaints, 95%+ of the time, there's nothing there. Probably half the time they just don't respond, half the remaining time they just loose another snipe or parting shot before disappearing, and most of the rest is something in the set of {doesn't actually happen/no evidence; assumes everyone agrees with them; problem is actually well-diagnosed but the proposed solutions are laughably naive}. The number of complaints or suggestions that are meaningfully actionable is very, very low.
What I've found looking at other subs and ours, is that generic complaints about sub quality and mod team actions are a quick and easy way to upvotes, but it's rare for someone to actually be well-informed on the topic and have actually thought through the problem and solutions they suggest.
So when Rich says, "Did you know that most patches/issues have poor problem statements, no description of the plan (read my code!), no consideration of alternatives, no tests, no designs, and are ill-conceived and/or broken in some way?" that doesn't surprise me in the least. Even when people nominally want to contribute, they usually don't seem to try very hard. For me, it's gotten to the point where I'm writing a guide for subreddit criticism and suggestions to try and improve the quality of the complaining.
tl;dr - even when something is reasonably well run by volunteers, people love their low-effort gripes and snipes