RMS has explicitly tried to claim the ability to veto group decisions within GNU affiliated projects in the past even though he never had that power implicitly nor explicitly in the past.
His cancellation has as much to do with pissing off so many of the people around him as anything else.
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235124.html
The Rust situation seems to be instance the woke purging each other, Soviet style.