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To me, it's not really a question of the choices Core, specifically, has made. What I'm curious about is whether anyone can actually do a good job at such a task.
There will always be disagreements about what Bitcoin is and how it should change. Many BIPs (like ordinals) are not soft forks -- and in such cases, it seems pretty clear that people should just do the thing they want to do. BIPs are a nice coordination tool, but there's no reason it needs to be hosted in the /bitcoin repo.
For soft or hard forks, it is more difficult. I think it's unreasonable to expect Luke Dashjr to implement a change he disagrees with and I think it's unreasonable to expect Core contributors to implement changes they disagree with. I'm pretty general in the camp that we shouldn't tell other people what to do.
To each his own would be fine...if there wasn't an expectation that one implementation was the "reference implementation." So, what's the solution? Perhaps it is more implementations. Or perhaps it is something more like what Knots and BIP 110 supporters are attempting now: fork Core and add your changes and then try to get everybody to run it. (I don't like their style, nor their substance, but I think the general methodology might be reasonable).
an interesting question is whether there's an equilibrium with multiple widely used implementations. I think there can be, and I reference Linux as an example. many different implementations, all are expected to work in some basic ways, but different emphases and features for each one
The thing everyone points to though is that Bitcoin is tricky because the expectation that it works "in some basic ways" is highly particular: all implementations that don't want to fork off have to work in exactly the same way across a pretty large set of rules and behaviors.
I agree that there probably is an equilibrium that can be achieved. And in that case, I wonder whether each implementation will house it's own BIP repo or whether there will be one implementation independent BIP repo or something else.
I feel like I'm wading into an area for which I'm very much an outsider / layman. But I did read the Rodarmor's post about his BIP getting shut down, and even while disagreeing with Ordinals, I don't think a unilateral shutdown with no reasoning given is ever a good idea. Perhaps sufficient reasoning was given in the discussion comments, which I didn't fully read, or elsewhere, but I think it's still important to offer a summary of the reasons in the final message, even if it's something like "We don't think this is consistent with our philosophy of what Bitcoin should be."
I can understand the frustration of the Core maintainers who have to do a pretty thankless job while under constant attack and presumption. But letting that get under your skin and bleed into impatience or curt interactions with outsiders, or a temptation to exert authority without discussion, is a recipe for loss of trust. In a way, that's kinda what happened with the "health experts" during COVID, because they got so impatient with debate that they just decided to shut down all dissent. That was a recipe for lost of trust, and I think in COVID it was also a recipe for becoming misguided and choosing a wrong direction.
Now, I don't know if Core is choosing a right or a wrong direction, but I think it's important to maintain a posture of patience and rationality even in the face of apparently very irrational and overconfident critics like Dathon and Luke.