This couldn’t be any further from my experience. Instead of being told fuck off, I was offered (and later offered when I became a maintainer myself) constructive criticism, often times with the patches, required to make it up to standard, included.

> maintainer says the old package works for him

We’re all just volunteers, who are doing this in our free time. Usually this works well enough for most packages, but you are always free to submit the fix yourself on nixpkgs ;). At least compared to other distros, that workflow simpler.