I understand that the tweeter is the original author of Babel - as such, I find this a little bit embarrassing.

The author originally had 100% control of governance and management decisions, and personally chose exactly how to delegate those.

A single person's salary (and the public disclosure of it) has created massive point of political tension for the project. I think that's a bigger problem than the perceived waste of $.

Yeah I also don't understand why this wasn't handled sooner. He said that in February the dev only made a small number of issues and no commits, I feel like the issue should have been caught there.

There's also a question of - what's the job description?

Henry makes it clear in a March 2018 blogpost that he doesn't see it as a primarily coding job, and his Twitter bio describes him as 'steward', not 'developer'.

https://www.henryzoo.com/in-pursuit-of-open-source-part-1/ https://twitter.com/left_pad

So, why is he being taken to task on only quantity of code as a measure?

OP called out PRs and comments, not just code. I’m not familiar with this project, but there’s a lot of stuff required for projects that isn’t coding but still shows up in GitHub’s activity. Even basic stuff like doing demos and updating customer stuff shows up as updates to the web site and notes on presentations and stuff.

Unless someone’s job is just sending email and talking on the phone, I’d expect some visibility. Not for tracking purposes, but for community engagement since it’s the best way to clarify requests, produce roadmap info, etc.

There’s six figure slackers at a lot of companies.

Companies have a lot of money, and a lot of it to burn. OSS doesn't.