On Strategic Maintainers: In the UI, I use dotted/hollow bars for Cory Fields, Carl Dong, and Sebastian Kung (sedited) from 2019–2025. This visually distinguishes that they were Strategic Maintainers (e.g., maintaining the build system, security, or Guix) but did not hold keys to merge into the master branch.
At least among Bitcoin Core contributors the term maintainer has a very specific meaning. I’m aware that these three led big projects, but I haven’t heard the term maintainer in that context before. Maybe a different term such as "project lead" would fit better?
Regarding Luke’s merge commits, it looks like the same thing happened there that also happened to Jonas. I tracked down there of his merge commits. One was the last commit in the PR https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7192, another was the second in https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7192, the third was the fourth in https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/505. The first two PRs later got merged by Mara van der Laan, the third by Gavin Andresen.
At least among Bitcoin Core contributors the term maintainer has a very specific meaning. I’m aware that these three led big projects, but I haven’t heard the term maintainer in that context before. Maybe a different term such as "project lead" would fit better?