Any tiny project on Github, Gitlab, ... which is maintained by one person but accepts PRs and feedback from outside contributors is essentially a BDFL project.
The single project owner decides what goes and doesn't go into the project by merging or rejecting PRs. People are still free to maintain their own forks with contributions that are not accepted into the main version.
In a way, the entire Github workflow is built around the idea of BDFL managed projects.
IMHO - No - having individual contributor workflows is diffenrent thing than aligning 10 people. The question is not who gets to do the decisions but how the team aligns itself and coordinates.
It’s an accurate observation that single contributor projects work well since then there is no need to spend effort in coordination and communication.
> The question is not who gets to do the decisions but how the team aligns itself and coordinates.
...IMHO it's the other way around, somebody needs to do the difficult and unpopular decisions exactly for those hopefully rare situations where the self-coordination within a team fails (and doing that in a way that doesn't piss off people in the team). In the end, contributors to an open source project are also just a very loosely coupled team.
'Unpopular' decisions are much easier to do in projects that have a universally accepted and respected BDFL (ideally the project founder) than in most 'commercial' teams led by random 'management-caste' peeps.
The single project owner decides what goes and doesn't go into the project by merging or rejecting PRs. People are still free to maintain their own forks with contributions that are not accepted into the main version.
In a way, the entire Github workflow is built around the idea of BDFL managed projects.