> it could have been rewritten, rewriting PRs is cheap today, but that isn't the question. the question is, would it have been accepted had it met all the quality and engineering standards and full disclosure that it was 90%+ LLM generated?

In this case it looks like the answer is "Yes"; the PR was not dismissed immediately, it was first examined in great detail!

Why would the maintainer expend effort on something that was going to be rejected anyway?

because the policy is clearly 'reject' and yet significant time has been spent - either effort was wasted or policy is at best 'not implemented'.

> either effort was wasted or policy is at best 'not implemented'.

I don't understand this PoV - have you ever come across a policy in any environment that wasn't subject to case-by-case exceptions?

Even in highly regulated environments (banking/fintech, Insurance, Medical, etc), policies are subject to exceptions and exemptions, done on a case-by-case basis.

The notion, in this specific case, that "well they rejected it because of policy" is clearly nonsense and I don't understand why people are pushing this so hard when the explanation of why an exemption can't be made for this specific PR is public, accessible and, I feel, already public knowledge.