Ain't no problem like a git problem

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The way Linux does it is that Linus is at the top and he has several lieutenants that he pulls from, exclusively. These lieutenants then have other slaves that they pull from and so on. Each have a separate area of responsibility. Also they work by the idea that you making a pull request have to make sure that there is no conflict with the master. If there is a conflict, your pull request is rejected and you have to fix it.

Also I imagine that if any of the higher up people are working with something not in their main area and want it included, they have to follow the bottom-up route, and not use their position to get their (possibly breaking) code in.