If a project does not have several hundreds of bad ideas, then probably it is not popular. I don't follow that many projects in detail, but all that I follow get a lot of bad ideas in time.

I think being qualified as a jerk or not is orthogonal to the need of gatekeeping (required in my opinion) or the quantities (higher for more popular).

How does this relate to the point that no one can determine?, of course they can guess and estimate…