In my opinion the project has some established guidance WRT workflows and processes for different aspects that should be explicitly documented somewhere for better collaboration:

1. who/when/how should be pulled to review PRs
2. who/when/how should be pulled to merge PRs
3. who/when/how should be pulled to make important/critical/strategic design decisions (both top- and low-level)

To make it more crisp, I find myself frequently asking following questions:

• I am not sure who has the best expertise or knowledge to review this PR. Whom should I pull? Just as an example of a formulation that might help here: "If you do not know whom to pull for a PR review, just take one of the persons listed in the CODEOWNERS file and that person might reassign it for you.".
• My PR passed all the criteria to be merged (passed tests and approval from a maintainer) and I have the rights to merge it. Should I merge it? Or wait for the maintainers to do it? GitHub provides some mechanisms to support on this and additionally some guidance in the CONTRIBUTING.md file would help.
• I am proposing big changes. Whom do I need to convince? All the maintainers? Is there a single person taking care of these decisions and I need to convince that very single person? Some contributors are talking of "core maintainers". Who are they? Do I need to convince one of them? All of them?

Just some examples of OSS projects doing so:

• https://github.com/ilbers/isar/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://github.com/neovim/neovim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#pull-requests-prs