Development of the platform itself has nothing to do with what anyone on it actually does though. That's the entire point. Reddit is a problem because the control is centralised in the admins who can unilaterally make mods on the site do whatever they want. Fediverse by-design is decentralised and absolutely nobody can be told what to do or forced into anything by any centralised power because none exists.

I'd argue that if the code is open source and the instances are independent, then the dev doesn't matter beyond merely the marketing, and the marketing will be affected by the rise of larger instances, like Lemmy.world.