I disagree with the basic premise of the article that maintainers are obliged to merge code changes by default.
One reason is that the maintenance burden falls on more than just the author, so there needs to be some consideration on whether it is maintainable and whether the people involved are willing and able to maintain it.
Particularly if the change adds a public API or behavior, it may have to be maintained for the life of the codebase.
Also, some projects have very high reliability expectations and you have to assume that code is broken until proven otherwise. I won't merge code until the author has demonstrated via tests, comments and clearly-written code that the change does as expected and doesn't introduce potential issues.
The attitude in the article isn't particularly conducive to the long-term health and quality of a project, since you get a bunch of authors ramming through their changes based on their agenda and end up with an inconsistent mess that nobody wants to maintain.
I was mentally thinking about refuting your argument, but then I started wondering about systemd (which I do not like, although I do have concrete criticisms).
One reason is that the maintenance burden falls on more than just the author, so there needs to be some consideration on whether it is maintainable and whether the people involved are willing and able to maintain it.
Particularly if the change adds a public API or behavior, it may have to be maintained for the life of the codebase.
Also, some projects have very high reliability expectations and you have to assume that code is broken until proven otherwise. I won't merge code until the author has demonstrated via tests, comments and clearly-written code that the change does as expected and doesn't introduce potential issues.
The attitude in the article isn't particularly conducive to the long-term health and quality of a project, since you get a bunch of authors ramming through their changes based on their agenda and end up with an inconsistent mess that nobody wants to maintain.