I don't have internal info so this is just an hypothesis, but I think they absolutely do expect adversarial commits and if you tried to get something accepted today with no affiliation or anything you would need to talk to multiple maintainers and your commits would be under scrutiny.

Here the "contributors" had done multiple commits and were coming from a university that had previously upstreamed several commits. There was and should be an expectation of trust because you can't scrutinize every commit for several hours (they just don't have them enough maintainers for it).