"steamrolling" being a strong term.
More they were pushing for code where it wasn't wanted. Maintainers should not be "forced" to accept code, and indeed, rust code should 'generally' be kept separate. This of course causes a whole lot of other issues, but that is what you get for having a dual language codebase.
The technical methods to handle these sorts of projects are not complex, the political aspects of course are not.
Many years of OSS have taught me what my strengths are, and political issues are not among them.
If I could give advice (which would not be accepted)... it would be to look at how enterprise handles multi language codebases.