Perhaps, though there are plenty of non-core developers who many of us would trust with vision but not a merge button (or who have never requested the merge button). When discussing this at the sprints we very easily made a list of about 10 potentials, all of whom you likely know (of), none of whom have been a core committer for CPython, but certainly know the language, ecosystem and community well enough to make well-informed decisions.
“Has reviewed pull requests” seems a bit of a restrictive qualification to require when it could be “has served on the PSF board” or “has taught X thousand students” or “has keynoted X Python conferences”.