I dunno. I've been making free software for 3 decades and I still think it's fun. While I do get slop PRs sometimes, it's not frequent. And when I want to land a patch in someone else's project, I haven't really been having difficulty doing so.

The main change for me has been... if I want to send someone a patch, it's more important now to talk to them about it first. But I was doing that anyway. Join the chatroom, let people know I found an issue and am working on fixing it, maybe get their advice on how they think it should be solved (to make sure it fits with their project and goals), and then send code. And stick around to help with testing and stuff. It's not much different than how things were before everything moved to GitHub.

Talk to people. Be a part of the community. That's what made free software work in the past, and it's what makes free software work now. As the article said, it was never just the code.