I feel like this happens surprisingly often: The best person “letting others do stuff” for fear of making others a freerider.
Freeriders exist sometimes, but usually it’s not due to inherent laziness but others’ abilities being superior to their own, or redundancy (even workplaces suffer from this).
Well, from my experience, how people sort this out: it’s usually a division of tasks and then each person works on their own (mostly) which kind of neglects the point of group projects in the first place.
And the judgement is usually subjective, and one problem can be that it’s not possible to know who did what in the first place, so everyone did stuff. However the ones negatively impacted by this the most might be powerful independent workers who would like to have all their ideas be their own but for fear of "neglecting others’ views” and “letting others have a chance”, they are forced to lower their capacity and work output.