Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was.
And here, by "stupidity," I just mean the author didn't think about that.
Too often people are willing to attribute sinister meaning to what, in reality, was just a mistake.
Since I can't read people's mind, a good trick that I learned is to derive intent from actions. Removing a merged PR is easy, especially when you can force merge one in the first place. Yet she didn't do it, but wrote a lot of text that is apparently an apology. If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR? Maybe because it's not actually an apology.
Edit: the PR was removed by the current maintainer.
And assuming bad intentions is a good way to live a miserable unhappy life.
Perhaps because nobody has asked her to do so. Despite the contribution process not being followed, the results are seemingly desirable; and so nobody seems to want to worsen the codebase by reverting the change, even temporarily.
Process is great when it improves quality, but process followed just to follow process—when it won't result in a change in quality—is just pageantry. Engineers are generally too practical (and impatient!) to participate in pageantry, even as an act of public humiliation for someone they're annoyed with.
The repo has other maintainers; any of them could have reverted the merge and demanded the PR process be followed, if they thought it was a good idea to do that. What intent do you derive from their inaction?
The PR is here, it was explicitly rejected (with two comments) and closed before she merged it
It looks like the actual maintainer reverted it?
Either way, I think the idea of "the banality of evil" is more useful here than Hanlon's Razor. Claire Novotny may well have simply not thought about her actions. Is she still responsible for them? Should we care that she meant well if she continued her bad behaviour after it was pointed out to her?
And what if somebody makes a habit of not thinking about their actions despite having it pointed out to them repeatedly that their actions cause harm to others? (It sure seems to be an effective way to climb the ladder.) Can they still hide behind the defense of "meaning well"? By analogy, what if somebody makes a habit of getting behind the wheel while intoxicated. If they hit a pedestrian, how much do you care that the drunk driver meant well?
But to address your analogy, I simply do not have enough information to tell whether Ms. Novotny is a bad actor or not. In the absence of such information, I can only assess a situation based on my prior life experiences.
In the vast majority of cases, the logic behind Hanlon's Razor held. Many times I assumed malicious intent and was proved wrong. As I've gotten older, I've assumed malicious intent less frequently.
I think "people that don't assume enough malicious intent" are a real thing, so I think Hanlon's razor is not an universally good recommandation.
When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, they probably did not see you or are late for an important event or their wife is in the emergency room having a baby. It probably was not personal or malicious.
"There is a pattern that needs to be resolved. Projects might not fully understand what joining the .NET Foundation means..."
This sounds like not only an apology, but an attempt to start a discussion surrounding the community overall and get everyone to have matching expectations.
the apology is because it's not just about this PR. Among other things there is moving a number of projects into the foundations enterprise gh org without any warning/discussion using the admin account they forced upon/bullied project orgs into adding. This has affected some in a negative way already.