"One of the maintainers" is not the general consensus of the GNU community. We must not condone them but I believe he just made a "calculation error" considering the question was a hyperbole
Many OSS projects are now run by people who see themselves as owning a farm of AI slaves.
They're more than happy to tell you they don't see themselves as owning the code. They aren't professional coders. They don't want to be.