alt Hacker Newsuv is Astral's onramp to paying customers. Without uv's tight integration with Astral's other tooling that they want to charge for, they wouldn't be able to sell anything. Building a business around doing the same for Ruby may be within their rights, but it's absolutely a conflict of interest working or contracted by Ruby Central. Removing them was an obvious move.
If this is a conflict of interest, then any Ruby core systems being controlled predominantly by members of the Shopify dev team is itself a conflict of interest. I am fine saying 'we need to make sure these libraries stay independent and community controlled', but that is so clearly not what was going on here. Believing that is just letting the RC FUD and PR control your thinking on the narrative.