As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation.
Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7.
My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris.
Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true.