Why does someone like that have full commit access to the repo?

Because nobody at the parent organization cares about anything but owning the brand.

> It looks like most of the recent commits are done by someone as mostly a way of learning and not for the sake of the project itself.

> https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commit/d2a7b3cc90e95392...

From that link:

> Most of the commits here seams to be mainly white space changes to random files.

It might not be "learning" but rather an attempt to game GitHub (e.g. rack up a lot of commits to important-sounding repos). My understanding is go around using automated tools to submit PRs that fix whitespace and typos in order to do that.