I for one am going through quite a culture shock. I always assumed the nature of FOSS software made it immune to be confined within the policies of nations; I guess if one day the government of USA starts to think that its a security concers for china to use and contribute to core opensource software created by its citizens or based in their boundaries, they might strongarm FOSS communities and projects to make their software exclude them in someway or worse declare GPL software a threat to national security.
Linux at this point is an absolutely critical part of the information infrastructure our world is built on. It’s not just a few nerds in basements cobbling together code. Safeguarding this infrastructure against bad actors is absolutely crucial for everybody’s safety. Unfortunately we’re going to see more of this kind of stuff in an increasingly polarised world.
Depending on industry, 60-80% of all servers, globally, are running on Linux. So yes, we are not going away.
Israelis are more known for putting backdoors wherever they can than Russians, for example.
Anyway, nation-states are not the only kind of group with malicious interest. Maybe a maintainer is a member of some mafia, I dunno. How are you going to know this?
Many things can be done with FreeBSD. Again, in our time it may get some popularity again not because of such events even, but because of their possibility and to avoid monoculture (in the context of backdoors too).