For a long time the GRUB upstream was not functioning at all, and once it started functioning, a number of years ago, it was slow and manual. That’s the reason that fedora has so many downstream patches. This year GRUB upstream moved to gitlab, has much better CI, become more accessible and much more lively.
We believe in a community approach that supports the things that people need and want, including support for various filesystems for those that want that, and a slimmer package with a smaller surface for those that want that.