This is pretty discouraging honestly, from the perspective of what the article calls a “fan”. I like to make small contributions to projects I use when I can, but I don’t become a core dev on any of them.

Is it really not worth the maintainers time to merge a bug fix or look at an issue I opened? Are they just doing it as “fan service”?

Genuinely, does this type of “participation” really waste more time than it saves on the whole?

That seems to be the implication of the article. I wonder if any open source maintainers can chime in.