I agree, I suspect what Ladybird is doing here may become the normal social model for open source going forward.

We still need some mechanism for determining which humans have enough long-term commitment to become maintainers. Source contributions are no longer a reliable signal for that, and I don't know what future signal we'll use going forward. That's going to be a hard problem.

But, who knows, if AI really does make programmers radically more productive, maybe successful open source projects don't need a large maintainer team.