Of course, this varies wildly across different projects, but it's applicable to many of the larger ones, including the ones that are upstream of Red Hat's products. It may seem bizarre to refugees from traditional proprietary companies, but "we can't dictate that, it's a decision that needs to be made by the community" is a legitimate reason for not doing something, even for projects like Fedora.
We may champion and promote a change, but actually making a change must go through the regular community channels, even if it was originally proposed internally at Red Hat.