I think, in their view, all comes after taking hold of the project. But here, they got that, and now what? Now, all lofty plans have to meet the cold reality.
It's like a mutunineers on a ship throwing officers overboard, just to realise hours later that they are in the middle of an ocean, and they have no idea how to sail a ship without skilled crew.
I saw that happening in public companies: a single asshole activist with puny few percents of the company keeps throwing big radical decisions onto every shareholder meeting, until he gets everybody so discombobulated, or the company so disfunctional that others either leave the company to him for taking, or he gets a legal casus belli to sue the company to try to wreck it further, and then seize it.
For such people, it doesn't matter if the company in question dies, as long as they come out with gain. Some are plainly idiots with too much legal education, and some are genuine degenerates doing it with full knowledge of consequences.
they'd be the only left able to offer (paid) support?
There fewer people contributing because programming in C is no longer fun or hip. It is not Gnome problem but the whole Linux ecosystem. Gnome is slowly adopting rust but the core framework is still C. There is plenty of active forks of Gnome2 people can contribute there.