Over the last several years we have become overwhelmed by the large number of code contributions (pull requests), especially those from new contributors. The number of open PRs has become a meme in the community. In part, the number of open PRs is a healthy sign that:

People are interested in contributing to Godot and are willing to put in time to contribute,
We are being cautious about feature creep,
We are dedicated to high code quality.
But ultimately, a large part of the backlog comes from the fact that the number of qualified reviewers is small, reviewing PRs is demanding, and we can’t keep up with everything coming in.

This problem is compounded by the recent increase in AI-generated contributions, both by AI agents and by humans submitting AI-generated code. The amount of effort required to make a PR has gone down (and number of PRs has increased as a result), while the amount of work to review PRs and the amount of people available to review has stayed the same. This reviewer shortage was already a problem, but it was one that we successfully ignored. We can no longer ignore it.