Context: they are making a terminal emulator. Something we've been doing for close to 60 years already.

At the time of this writing their repo has over 1400 open issues.

At the time of the "kerfuffle" their code couldn't output more than 10 (or was it 40?) characters per second to the screen on what is essentially a supercomputer. And they claimed it required "a doctoral research into performance" to make it better.

What other trivial improvements to their code also "require a doctoral research"?

Yes. Their code is definitely massively overcomplicated and I doubt they have any control over it any more.