[mjw1007]

It would be better if there was a layer of maintainers between the free software authors and the end users that could act as a buffer in cases like this, in particular to take care of security vulnerabilities that genuinely need dealing with quickly.

Of course that's exactly what traditional Linux distributions signed up to do.

Clearly many people have decided that they're better off without the distributions' packaging work. But maybe they should be thinking about how to get the "buffering" part back, and ideally make it work better than the distributions managed to.