Oh how naive! Democracy! Egalite! On the contrary, other projects where the leaders went away, clearly show that the race to the bottom line ("bus factor") only destroys a project, and is not able to fulfill the role of the elite developers. The only challenge is to keep the elite developers, not to get more individual contributions. Without efficient leadership it goes downhill.
It would be more interesting to compare the current inefficient businesses practices of a non-technical lead without proper tooling, to the open source practice of the technical lead, with proper tooling.