Simply not true. In any such project, major proposals first get discussed as issues and community either vets a plan or comes up with an alternative before more solid steps such as PRs start. What is being done here is clearly trying to downplay a major change as a minor one. There are loads of blog posts and discussions on why this isn't a minor change, especially when the author of the PR himself admits the goal is to comply with age verification laws. I will not get into that here. Suffice to say, at best, this is a political statement of the kind "we are ok to comply with surveillance and will show minimal resistance". Yet they try to play this as if they are just changing a typo in the documents. Thanks to Lennart for his life long contributions to FOSS, despite him at some point joining Microsoft, the antithesis of everything that is FOSS. I am sure many things he did shaped how the open-source developed on a world-wide level. This still does not mean that his reaction to everything will be correct. To me this was more like a "fuck all, this was a minor change, don't care what you say" attitude, which in my world-view has place in propriety software world not FOSS.

You're approaching this with an everyday definition of "proposal", but in the industry that term is overloaded with more specific meanings.

If you asked 100 random devs, I have no doubt that the majority would call a PR to be something much more concrete than a proposal.