The informal architecture point cuts deeper than most governance critiques. Formal power is auditable — you can see votes, trace funding, map org charts. Soft power over a codebase works through reputation, review queues, and social consensus that's nearly impossible to reconstruct after the fact. The harder question isn't whether consolidation happened, but whether any open-source project at this scale can avoid it. You need *someone* to have merge access, *someone* to decide what gets funded. The question is whether those functions concentrating in overlapping hands was path-dependent drift or something more deliberate — and whether the ecosystem ever seriously interrogated the difference.