We can probably speculate that people actually interested in the technology and who seemed quite friendly got on quite well, indeed a lot of people here still do and can.

I'd say Theymos, satoshi and a few others probably got along quite well (or at least didn't hate each other) and it doesn't take long for people to feel comfortable around people and to know what they're about (the same is true for discomfort and hostility - which is harder for people to bother to ignore online).

We don't know for sure how things might have been handled at the start too. Satoshi handed the forum's domain over to two people and things were given to other teams too - like I don't think Theymos or cobra had too much power over the git repo and there are two main bitcoin sites you can use to download what claim to be the official bitcoin client - the main one being bitcoincore.org and I'm not sure who controls that.

It's also very hard to delete stuff online, perhaps satoshi thought they'd just start up a rival forum if Theymos went rogue and provide proof they are satoshi.