True, code for critical IT infrastructure should always be reviewed. But from what I understand, this is difficult because there is one full-time developer (paid by the Rust Foundation) and a small number of volunteers, who don't have the time to review all the employee's changes.
Sure, but you should always have a core contributor required to review code before it gets merged. That's a feature GitHub offers, and it should be used. Block all PRs unless there's at least one review from a trusted contributor, and consider requiring a second review from any source.
Requiring a review from a trusted contributor ensures that one of those trusted contributors reviews the code. The one main maintainer should add more people to that trusted circle, which will ensure that at least one of those will review all code that goes into the codebase.
If people see that code isn't being merged, someone will step up to request to be in that trusted circle.
Yeah. At my current and previous jobs, literally everything going into an actual product required a code review, and that's despite all the code being written by employees that you could generally trust. Even if my boss or literally the most experienced and trusted dev wrote a commit, it still needed a review.
It's feels weird submitting my own code without a review for side projects. So many bugs have been caught by reviewers that writing code that another person would use without it being reviewed feels just wrong.