In my opinion, Debian has the best open-source governance model out of all the projects without a BFDL. Because it basically emulates it by appointing a single person to be responsible for the entire vision, yet making him still accountable to others[1]. Thus the horror of the "design by committee"[2] is avoided. [1] https://www.debian.org/devel/leader [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee
If it did, a virtual BDFL would have been able to stop the whole systemd vote from happening, declare that systemd would be the default going forward, and require that some number of developers come forward to take maintainership of alternate init system if init decoupling were to be a requirement in Debian. And Debian depends on a human WoT anyway. So a reasonable amount of developers saying, "Ok, we'll make sure everything can work on multiple init systems going forward," would be enough. And if that turned out to be untenable, they could make a different decision down the road.
But that couldn't have happened because it would have gone against the democratic spirit of Debian.
Compare to what Linus did with the pull request for kdbus. He said he trusted his maintainer who did the request, but also pointed out the amount of work and problems that could come from maintaining it. Maintainers argued, but ultimately it was the maintainers who retained agency and who ultimately maintained a sense of trust among each other.
Now imagine if instead there had been a vote of Linux users/foundation members/whatever to decide whether to include kdbus. Linux would have bled developers regardless of the outcome. Because that model of governance would have given them less agency to make decisions about the direction of the project.