No, I did not conflate contributors and maintainers. In Bitcoin Core nothing gets merged until it has been reviewed by several regular contributors, usually several times. Sure, one of the five maintainers (who are part of the regular contributors) is usually the last reviewer and will merge a PR if it has had enough review and they're satisfied, but they don't merge things that haven't been reviewed by other knowledgeable developers, mostly from those 40 regulars.