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In what way? Regardless of whether they're using CI they still have to pull and mainline your change.

It helps to filter out contributions. If CI is broken you send it back to the contributor. Maybe with some guidance. Only if CI passes you take a deeper look. This helps to spend time efficiently.

Of course this has the risk that contributors spend much time on making a patch pass all tests and then get it rejected, since maintainers don't like the feature.

It’s also helpful from the other end. As a new contributor, I feel a lot more confident making a PR if there are tests and I can show I didn’t break them.

There are a lot of benefits, like you can have a 'test' that just helps you avoid aggravating scenarios by rejecting pull requests with messy code because the linter failed. If you have to discuss how random pull requests can be improved to meet your standard you are going to waste a lot of energy.

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