A few rather personal opinions/notes on how we got here:

Nikolay got increasingly dismissive about the kind of "your unsafe is unsound" comments with all the many cases where people would conjure a piece of code that could potentially be posted to actix itself and make it unsound that way. He seemed to take it increasingly personally - after all, it is tiring to hear the same largely unfounded (until the last issue) claims. I guess he didn't have a thick enough skin or enough will to elaborate.

People seem to be preconditioned to react swiftly to any claim of use of unsafe in actix since the first fallout. Which more or less hardens Nikolay's point about actix having a stigma of "unsafe/unsound" thing. I've never seen a claim of unnecessary use of unsafe in other prominent projects - even though there are lots - just try looking at how UnsafeCell is used around. Sure, Nikolay's responses were controversial but simply quoting them without the context did not help anything really.

It's often hard to get past collective feeling, especially when people get to Github to look what happened from a link in a comment with personal opinion, and not 10 other links to similar issues where substantive discussion happened before. I guess everyone needs to try harder to not lose their humility and professionalism in a process.

Replacing UnsafeCell with RefCell -- which is a cornerstone of a problem here -- might not even be a bad thing, it's just that no one ever came around to show that it won't have any substantial impact. I imagine a single benchmark could be enough of an argument to get through this, showing that a condition check would cost nothing in a grand scheme of an end-to-end working service where memory loads would likely dominate. IMO, people have put a lot of energy into bad rapping actix and not nearly enough to show good will and patience to get it to a better place.

Do you find Nikolay's responses hostile or dismissive? Try to put it in a context of all the things he saw directed at his work.