You guys seem to be at an all-hands-on-deck firefighting situation at the moment. That’s a frustrating place to be and makes delays due to review and release cycles feel extra burdensome. Nonetheless review is a good thing and maybe extra necessary when there’s already a feeling of panic.
I’m 100% certain that Audrius turning on “review required” is not about punishing anyone or preventing fixes from getting in. It’s just good practice that should have been in place already.
Note too that it does not mean depending on a repo admin to get things merged. What you need is two people with push access to the repo - one author and one reviewer. Anyone of the 35 current members in the Syncthing org can be either of those.
I’m also quite certain that maintaining a fork is less fun than you might imagine it being.