You might care to notice that the resignation was announced by Andrew Gallant—more commonly known as BurntSushi[1]—who is one of the most well-respected, talented, and prolific contributors in the wider Rust community. Amongst other things, they are the author of ripgrep[2], the regex[3] crate, and the byteorder[4] crate. They have multiple projects which are amongst the most-downloaded crates[5] in the Rust ecosystem.

One would struggle to find more than a handful of people who have done more "actual work" for Rust than Andrew.

[1]: https://blog.burntsushi.net/about

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

[3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex

[4]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/byteorder

[5]: https://crates.io/crates?sort=recent-downloads