From my fairly quick reading, their premise seems to be "we can no longer trust /unknown/ developers who use AI to understand and maintain the code they submit", rather than a simple attack on those who use AI.

This seems fair to me: numerous developers would love to put "contributed to the Ladybird project" on their curriculum vitaes, and AI tools can now make this within the reach of a huge number of people.

But the Ladybird project needs more than just working-code, something that AI can easily produce: they need code that is understood and maintainable by the person who submitted it.

Not only does AI-generated code fail to guarantee this understanding and maintenance (to a greater degree than before), but the developers increasingly need to get through an avalanche of AI-generated pull requests rather than, say, code new features.

I would prefer projects to be developed in the open: but when developing in the open makes the code checking exponentially harder, and the chance of the submitters sticking around becomes significantly lower, then I can at least understand.

When the dam starts to overflow, then something needs to be done.