Big problem is that just forking it isn't enough, you also have to convince every distro out there to switch to your fork to make any real difference. It becomes a truckload of boring work for what might be a trivial one-line fix in the code.

I blame the package managers we use for this, as most of them make it incredible difficult to change anything and make you a slave to whatever the distribution ships, which in turn is slave to whatever upstream ships. The effort to fix the issue just far outweighs the issues the problem is causing in the first place.

NixOS is one of the few that seems to get this right by making code changes pretty much trivial. Just fork the upstream repository, point the package to the new fork and you are done. With a Nix flake you can even make the repository itself installable directly. No need to try to convince any maintainer to include your patch. And having package names be hashes means you can switch between old, new and patched versions of a software easily, no need to worry about conflicts or having to un/reinstall all the time. Downside is the lack of binary compatibility in NixOS, meaning if you change a package deep down the dependency tree you might end up recompiling half your distribution and can no longer use the precompiled binaries (there is `patchelf` to workaround this, but haven't used that myself yet).