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Ah, but how do you decide who has the most merit? Its not always clear which code is best, like if it has a subtle vulnerability in it. The traditional method was "Stahlman and Linus decide" plus a handful of other greybeards with their special domains. Transitions are always a dangerous time fir monarchies.
The idea is that people can generally vote with their feet.
Everyone is free to build their own GNU/Linux distribution. Or fork Linux. Or gcc.
Of course, upstream is generally a good Schelling point, so a project has to have some serious issues before a fork succeeds. But in general, this is not a monarchy, but more like a wisdom of the crowds thing.
If anything, GNU/Linux is, itself, an example of voting with feet. There's a reason we're not running GNU Hurd for a full GNU stack.
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Open source was always way more decentralized than you are portraying it. Even something like the GNU project is so vast that there's simply no way that one person could keep track of every patch. Forget about it for something like the Apache Foundation.
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