Does that create a sort of Conway's law pushing complexity to the FE?

They offset that risk by taking 2 months to design and implement complex features like "add a new text box in the form, to enter an IP address".

I haven't seen them merge a pull request in less than 3 days. However simple.

The team lead, in 2 years, contributed less than 20 pull requests, all of which were 1 to 3 line changes to CSS or similar.