That's because he's actually not a bad guy. I've known him for almost a decade and he's pretty nice.Honestly the project lead doesn't seem like that bad of a guy overall, he just let his team have tooo much freedom and not near enough oversight. I wouldn't blame him as much as the rest of the team.
He was also not really a project lead in the literal sense. He was more of a manager, trying to make the team finish the mod. He took over after the previous lead left the team, because he knew the mod would never be finished without someone pushing the team members, making them actually work on the mod.
He wasn't involved in the content decision, or the mod story, or anything about the mod really. All of that happened during the previous lead time.
And to be honest, he was super burned out of being in the Frontier team, he had decided years ago, that once the mod was released he would quit the team. The Frontier team was always disconnected and disorganized, and that burned him out years ago.
Just for reference, several TTW team members were invited to join the Frontier (at one point or another) and after they hanged around their Discord channel and tried to get acquainted with their workflow and how stuff worked in that team, they all left before a week had passed.
I really wouldn't have had the force of will of being the lead guy of such a team at all... And I really don't know how he managed to put up with it for so long, although it was taking a toll on his mental health. Even before all of this shitstorm happened he was already considering that he would quit modding.