> Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff?
Social validation. Or, to be slightly more generous, sort of a compulsory way to force someone more experienced to provide some mentorship, by compelling them to review your pull requests.
That’s the point here, though. The maintainers of Ladybird don’t want to be compelled to mentor people making throwaway contributions without a commitment to the project. It’s pretty frustrating to try to mentor an absentee mentee who isn’t actually ready to learn from you.
I expect they'd like to not mentor new people attempting to make real contributions as well. Sometimes you're just not in a position to do that.
You make a strong point. Large parts of a decision like this have less to do with what you can get from the community, but what you have person-hours available to do with it. The core team is pretty small, and a lot of these automatically coded PRs are bound to be huge. They’re taking back their own time to focus on their own project.