Its not more complicated. I guarantee you some of the devs have beef with each other behind the scenes long before this, and this is just the scapegoat for it. That's always what happens with these FOSS projects with more than one person working on them.

And its almost always over the dumbest things like "they liked X tweet on Twitter I don't like" or "they didn't do something I wanted."

They were complicit in allowing the supposed shady code for a long time, what suddenly changed? Its not incredibly hard to imagine.