I've been worried about this project for a very long time. I checked out slowly from pywikibot and I expressed my concerns to the developer relations team privately but after this bug [1], I think it's time to speak out.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying pywikibot is dying or will die soon. I'm saying this project is going in unhealthy direction. I'm not de-valuing other people's work and I think they are great but they are missing a few steps that other projects don't.
1- Pywikibot has the biggest number of open patchsets after mediawiki/core. You might say, it's okay. Pywikibot is completely volunteer-based but ratio of distinct users / open patchsets is horrifyingly high. Meaning we have some developers that make a patch and they don't engage in reviewing them even if the patch got -1 or -2 (and funnier sometime they -1 or -2 their own patches) and move on to making other patches. Most of them end up in a obsolete situation needing a rebase or not needed anymore.
2- Developers don't engage in dialogue in proper places so others don't know about issues. No one can subscribe to the phabricator board, it's too big but it would be nice to bring some discussions here.
3- No active developer is connected to other part of wikimedia projects like listening to api announcements.
4- (Sometimes) It's a hostile environment. Behavior of other developers sometimes is demotivating.
5- There's no ArchCom here. I have an approach which might be wrong but another developer comes and disagrees and suggests another approach. I don't like it but there is no place to give the last call so it'll stay at -1 or -2 mode forever. TLDR: Sometimes I feel someone just owns the project and makes patches stuck just by disagreeing on the approach.
6- There is no, absolutely not, a single guide on how to code review. I know code review sucks in Wikimedia technical projects but this one is another level. People send out -2 because "the syntax is ugly" (and the patch is not a fifty nested loops, it's a['foo'] = 1 instead of a['foo'] = True). Mostly they just care about style rather than bugs.
I might be wrong and/or out-dated. Correct me please.
Best