Conversely, projects without clear leadership include rust (recently) and R, and I think they suffer for it.
A very widespread system for organising people is to have a single responsible decision-maker, supported, monitored and advised by a committee. We see that through politics and business, and a lot of the best open source projects seem to do the same thing.
Many of those, including Linux as far as I know, simply started as projects that were driven by single authors with a strong vision and remarkable diligence.
Then people flocked to those projects, but with the understanding and appreciation of that vision.
I don’t think any of them wanted to be BDFLs for the sake of power. They were the original authors and _made_ something useful. I don’t think any of them took over an existing project and declared themselves dictators. Ironically they all would be way too opinionated to do so.
But php, one of the most notoriously chaotic mainstream languages, has a bdfl. And lua, arguably more disciplined than all of the ones you listed, has not.
PHP is governed by an RFC process requiring a 2/3 majority vote of a couple dozen core devs. This has been the case for nearly 20 years now. Rasmus rarely even votes these days.
* Keras
* Ruby
* Clojure
* Zig
* OCaml
* Vim
* Elixir
I think all of these have ended up being unusually coherent. I may not agree with their design philosophy, but there clearly is one.