People really seem to be looking for someone to blame here, but Github was always public and there was always the ability for any random person to inundate you with garbage pull requests. My experience maintaining open source projects is that most pull requests are more work to review (and coach) then they would be to just do from scratch yourself. But you're letting people contribute to something bigger than themselves, being a part of something. And, the first small request may lead to big improvements in the future. So maybe it's not all bad.

It doesn't bother me that DigitalOcean is incentivizing people to contribute to open source. Yeah, they were pretty bad at it, but we were all bad at it at some point. Encouraging people to take that chance is valuable to me. (Some other comments mention sending DigitalOcean an angry email because they are customers. I'm a customer too! Maybe I'll send them a nice email.)

Github could do some work to improve this. For example, they could add a feature that requires lint/tests to pass before the PR is even brought to the attention of a maintainer. That would be good even outside of Hacktoberfest; I have no doubt wasted a colleague's time pointing out a lint error that the linter would have pointed out a few minutes later (if I had not forgotten to run it).

People get a chance to try out open source contribution. Github gets some ideas on how to improve their product. I'm just not all that angry.