Niri is currently being "hugged to death", if you want to contribute: Donate to Ivan or review others PRs before making your own, the project has no commercial backing and he's "overloaded" by the projects recent success.
I've been using it for years now and it's obvious that Smithay and Niri are high-quality projects, I haven't had any issues other than missing features (more of which has become available over time).
How much does random people reviewing other people's PRs help in practice?
As a maintainer I'd still want to review PRs myself before merging, no matter how many random people did it before me.
As a contributor, I'd hate for a random with shallow understanding of the problem/project to come in and tell me I had to change stuff or say my PR's no good, in the chance that the maintainer is easily influenced by strong internet opinions.
Drive-by contributions of all kinds suck for the most part, don't contribute if you're not going to do it properly. At some point there's got to be more than one person able to review PRs (if the project scope mandates it).
Linus Torvalds doesn't review all changes he merges, how do you become a comaintainer if not assisting with maintenance?
If you can't review, don't make a PR (or something).
I second this, if you are daily niri user, show your appreciation, I already did! Here's my personal setup, hope it inspires someone to try it https://github.com/knoopx/nix
Link to support: https://github.com/sponsors/YaLTeR
As a hyprland user, why should I switch to Niri? Is the appeal based on the "inifinite windows" feature
I don't think its for everyone, the paper metaphor either works for you or it doesn't.
That said, the other big benefit for me is it breaks a lot less often than hyprland and its ecosystem seems to (and I don't just mean bugs here, I also mean things like config file format changes). And this isn't a slam on hyprland - I was only ever mildly annoyed by its breakage.
"written on rust" is one pro, the other is the native scrolling thing, I appreciate workspaces with a bit of leeway. If you're already on hyprland it'll be an easy switch