One character change in Open Source Software

My latest contribution was a one-character change. I changed a String from '?' to '!', which fixed a bug downstream because it was detecting the String as a pattern instead of a literal.

This was one commit of a larger PR that was about 100-line more substantive change in total.

Nobody commented about anything substantive, but the single-character change generated 10 comments and a passionate debate about where exactly pattern should be detected, how quoting should be (or should not be made, etc), and a whole design of the system.

Now I am not getting paid for this, so I just removed the one-character change just to satisfy the reviewers and so the substantive change could be reviewed and the underlying bug fixed.

Here is the question: "Really?" I maintain some popular Source projects and I am never so pedantic. I noticed many people care too much about silly minutia instead of overall goals to projects.

What drives this? Why not keep the overall goal in mind and not get bogged down for silly things like single-character changes?