They don't owe us anything, but that's completely unrelated to the current discussion. They can be completely free to do whatever they want, and users can also disagree with that and voice said disagreement. It's a two way street. Especially in a situation where there's only "one" maintainer per package per distro, meaning that users of the distro (who can be other maintainers too) can disagree with it and openly so. There's a reason why Debian doesn't allow a maintainer to say, gut systemd or switch to another init system unilaterally just because they are volunteering to maintain the package