I hadn't heard, but you're right. And they've clearly taken account of the negative impact a particular group was having on the ecosystem.

From the FAQ on https://hacktoberfest.com/ :

> Do I still submit pull requests to earn swag?

> Pull requests and merge requests will no longer count toward Hacktoberfest rewards. It’s easier than ever to submit low-effort spam PRs to projects, so we’re listening to maintainer feedback and no longer actively incentivizing PRs. That being said, we certainly still encourage you to work on open source and share your work with the world during Hacktoberfest. Our new format focuses on learning and building together while reducing the burden of low-effort contributions on maintainers.

Good to see them adapt to the times. Using maintainers as free labour via PR abuse was such a 2023 way of being a parasite to the free software community. The new, cool way of doing it is to endorse the technology that can wash free software of those pesky copyleft licenses and unevenly distribute the expertise it encodes to the corporations who can pay for the most tokens.