Well, in reality it’s more complicated there always were approaches through committee and approaches outside (conda being an initiative, and lately there is an explosion of tools making use of the pyproject.toml interface).

with packaging there are things the committee is good at (making sure that a change to packaging does not break packaging for certain configurations and use cases) and individual initiatives outside of the committee often had drawbacks improving packaging in some area and making it worse in others. But the “committee” then was able to take inspirations into the committee which means there is the best of both worlds.

IMHO the python PEP process is a good example of python going the middle way.