This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.
In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.
“10ft away from the screen”. I.e. sitting in a sofa playing on a TV, compared to sitting at a desk close to a monitor