So from what I know, being a secondary source instead of a tertiary source, the player council was a group meant to represent the playerbase in the decision making of the server. Unlike all other staff roles, the player council was an elected position.
Given the uh, state, of golden at the time it was created (it wasn’t quite as bad as the post-DDOS desolation era, but most of the people involved in forums and the community at the time were El Robusto) the player council basically did end up being a circle of assistants deciding the laws of the lands, yes.
The player council ended up with such all stars as Dimas and WindowsError, with Dimas being responsible for this wonderful screenshot
and WindowsError being a lot harder to track down on account of being fucking nuked off the surface of Beestation three times over.
A lot of them were not what modern beestation would consider “good people” or “upstanding citizens” or “sane”