That seems rather one-sided to me. In a healthy FOSS ecosystem, shouldn't the upstream developers and distro maintainers be peers, with the upstream developers respecting the needs and values of the distro maintainers, rather than unilaterally insisting that the distro maintainers adapt?

I have sympathy for overburdened distro maintainers who feel that recent trends in upstream development practices are going in the wrong direction, as expressed in this blog post earlier this year: https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/03/07/money-isnt-going-...

Edit to add: And yet, I would be very reluctant to give up the safety of Rust to go back to C or C++. I don't know what the answer to that one is, but I don't think it's to tell the distro maintainers that their role (decided by whom?) is to adapt to what upstream developers are doing.