If you’re being berated by multiple people as to your speed of delivery, then it is not unexpected for them to be convinced that they are somehow the problem, and transfer the project to whoever they feel at the time is the best choice without thinking through their decisions.

However, knowing a person personally doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

I used to work on an open source project a long time ago (under a pseudonym) that I do not wish to name here for reasons that’ll become clear shortly. The lead programmer had a co-maintainer who the lead seemed to have known quite well.

The co-maintainer constantly gaslit me, and later, other maintainers, belittled them, criticized them for the smallest of bugs etc. (and not in a Linus Torvalds way, where the rants are educational if you remove the insults) until they left; and was egged on by the lead maintainer as they agreed with the technical substance of these arguments.

Many years later, the co-maintainer attempted a hostile takeover of the project, which did not go as expected, and soon after, multiple private correspondences with other people became public where it became clear that the co-maintainer always wanted to do this, and gaslighting other maintainers was just part of this goal. All of this, despite the fact that the two of them knew each other.