We used to deploy on Debian at my previous place, and we hit this sort of shit all the time. Maintainer ripped out features they disagreed with (political reasons, or just engineering/product taste), maintainers changing the configuration files to things that suited them better, etc.
I understand it's all volunteer work, I understand it's open source so anyone can add their own custom packaging, on top, but Debian (the OS) certainly uses the ecosystem as a selling point, and it really can come back to bite you.
When I say "political" I'm referring more to belief systems, but calling them religious beliefs would be far too antagonistic for the point I'm trying to make.
Iceweasel is full of examples of parts of Firefox removed because the maintainers had personal disagreements on the values of Firefox. Firefox is a fairly privacy-forward browser and Mozilla stand up for a lot of those ideals, and yet Iceweasel pulls features and telemetry on the basis of them being by-definition bad. I think that's a politics/identity statement more than a UX improvement.
I strongly disagree with packagers putting their opinion on top of the software they are packaging, I think packaging should be as pure a translation as is possible for the target system. Now in the case of Iceweasel it could change the branding which I think would give them more leeway to put opinion into it as it's "not Firefox" and there's little risk of users being confused, but I'd also bet that Debian wouldn't accept another pure Firefox packaging because it would duplicate the package in their minds. If that is the case I think that nullifies the idea.
I understand it's all volunteer work, I understand it's open source so anyone can add their own custom packaging, on top, but Debian (the OS) certainly uses the ecosystem as a selling point, and it really can come back to bite you.