Contributors may be granted some form of 'collaborator' status on the repositories under github.com/smogon which provides various permissions that can be used to help develop and maintain the project. Which contributors receive which permissions is a decision left up the to each project owner, but some general rules apply:
- Permissions are primarily granted to make things more convenient for yourself and the project owner. If you are not confident about how a change would be received by the project owner / active stakeholders, please open PR (or don't merge another person's PR). Fixing your own typos, lint errors, bugs in code that you've written yourself etc are probably safe and desirable to push directly (making sure you follow the project's requirements on commit message style!), but larger changes to parts of a project's code that you are not already the owner/point person of are always better off going through the review process (though really, any substantial change would benefit from code review by other contributors).
- If you are not an active contributor to the project's codebase but have been given permissions it is due to the owner's trust in your judgement to know when said permissions would be approriate to use (ie. the owner is pretty sure you're not going to be randomly merging or pushing large changes in a codebase you're unfamiliar with without clearing it first with them).