First, let’s talk about governance. OpenTelemetry does not have a benevolent dictator. In my opinion, that would be an inappropriate model for a project that wishes to become an open standard.
Instead, we have a governance committee. The committee was initially seeded with founding members, but all positions going forward are elected by the project contributors. In my experience, contributing engineers tend to vote for other contributing engineers. This keeps the project healthy by ensuring that it is governed by respected, active participants.
The responsibilities of the governance committee are clearly spelled out in our charter, which the wonderful Sarah Novotny guided us in drafting. Contracts are for handling conflict, so it is not really fun to write them. But having everything spelled out prevents a number of potential issues.