I have a feeling that a non-trivial portion of changes & strategy are being discussed, debated, and decided in the non-public Slack® chat room, or other private venues, rather than here on meta or on the #discourse IRC channel.
As a data point, many or most open source projects have policies that all decisions are made publicly, and many open source contributors & users will presume that’s the way things happen. (e.g., Apache has always been famous for their saying “if it didn’t happen on the mailing list, it didn’t happen”.)