Wanting to and actually doing it are two different things.
The problem is that open source devs also have to be their own project managers, but those two jobs have very different skillsets.
In regular software development, it’s the PM’s job to deal with the drama, filter the idiocy out and collect concise and actionable user stories, and let the developers just write code.
In open source, you tend to deal with a lot of entitlement. All kinds of people, who never gave you a dime, come out out of the woodwork to yell at you over every little change. The bigger and farther reaching a project is, the more this happens, and it wears you down. I can only imagine what it’s like working on a huge project like GNOME.
And the toxicity feeds into itself. Be kurt with one person, and suddenly it gets out that you’re an asshole to users. Then people come in expecting hostility and react defensively to every little comment. And that puts you in the same mindset.
At the end of the day, you can’t satisfy everyone. Sometimes you gotta figure out how to tell someone their feature request is stupid and you’re not gonna work on it, especially not for free. And a lot of people need to learn to try to fix problems themselves before opening an issue. That’s kind of the whole point of open source.