See Fix Eelco's Nix team title by infinisil · Pull Request #1410 · NixOS/nixos-homepage · GitHub and associated links for a bit of how I feel about this. In short, since joining the Nix Team, my relationship with Eelco has improved a lot.
Ideally that’s a sign of a replicable process — a little bit of video call face time goes a long way, much better than async messages. On the other hand, maybe that is a sign that I am “corrupted by proximity” and no longer able to empathize with what others are still experiencing and, accordingly, act as their ally.
I do believe that Eelco doesn’t wish to act as BFDL on the Nix Team, nor do the rest of us defer to him as if he was. Indeed the website (per the link) is updated so that it no longer says he is team lead (which I think was always an oversight). I hope that this can be a tiebreaker between the two above interpretations — to the extent that Eelco has not changed / still causing problems, he simply is less powerful than he was before.