In principle yes, in practice it's much harder. People want to be on the safe side, sure the claim that the piefed developer eats babies seemed a but dubious and the evidence didn't totally make sense to me but better safe than sorry I guess, there's a hint of truth in every legend etc.

Maintaining a large FOSS project seems to always become such a shitstorm I'm surprised there's anyone left doing it without profit incentives.

It's particularly frustrating to see in projects like PieFed that I've been following from the start and I know the software and the intentions of the developers quite well, only to see a bunch of tin foil nutjobs and no life trolls attack it for all sorts of reasons ranging from the absurd to the deranged.