The theory is that the creation review serves as the election for the initial committers. In practice, the initial committers are effectively assigned.
Typically projects start with a small handful (five to eight or so) of initial committers. And, to be frank, in many cases, the initial committers often all work for the same employer. The EMO pushes for as much diversity as possible in the initial committer list, but we don't make it a showstopper. Instead, I get to badger projects about diversity as they mature.
The composition of an initial project team is always a best guess. My perception (I haven't queried my data to back this up) is that many/most of our projects start with at least a couple of committers who it later turns out don't have the time and energy to actually work on the project. These committers eventually get retired out of the project and replaced by committers (via meritocratic process) who do.
The Jakarta EE specification projects were a bit of a special case. We had to stand up a lot of projects as quickly as possible with the help a very small number of very dedicated folks from Oracle who dedicated an insane amount of time and energy to meet with all of the stuff that had to happen to bring these specifications into open source. At that time, we collectively decided that it was better to just include everybody to make sure that we didn't exclude anybody. For the most part, the folks listed as initial committers were part of the expert groups for related specifications (there are very likely exceptions). In my opinion, this demonstrated sufficient merit for initial committers. So yes, the initial committer lists were long and we now have project teams that have many committers who are not active.
This was our solution to the bootstrapping problem. Frankly, I'm not entirely certain how (at least in the general case) to better demonstrate sufficient merit when bringing a project into open source. You can argue that we should have started with smaller teams. Maybe you're right. But, (again) frankly, we had to do a tonne of work to make this happen and the folks that helped us assemble those initial committer list did all sorts of superhuman things to make those initial committer lists and everything else happen.
So here we are some period of time later. We've elected around 60 folks to around 75 new committer positions since the initial creation of the projects and retired around 105 committer assignments. Note that these numbers are from a rough (quick) query that I made against the database that we use to track committers. The point is that project teams are changing. If anybody cares about the actual numbers, I can put more rigour in to coming up with a better query.
So anyway... it's happening. It's working. Project teams are changing composition. They will stabilize over time and the dream will be made real. We haven't reached the steady state yet, but we will.
Having said all that, if you feel that specific committers are exerting unfair influence over a project or are acting in a manner that is damaging to the project, the EDP has a grievance handling process. Or just let me know and I'll work with the PMC sort it out.
Wayne