"Open source has always worked on a system of trust and verify"
Not sure about the trust part. Ideally, you can evaluate the change on its own.
In my experience, I immediately know whether I want to close or merge a PR within a few seconds, and the hard part is writing the response to close it such that they don't come back again with the same stuff.
(I review a lot of PRs for openpilot - https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)
When there's time, you review, when there isn't you trust...
Cool to see you here on HN! I just discovered the openpilot repository a few days ago and am having a great time digging through the codebase to learn how it all works. Msgq/cereal, Params, visionipc, the whole log message system in general. Some very interesting stuff in there.