This statement by the author is not true. I lead Home Assistant[1], last year the 10th most active project on GitHub[2]. We love Hacktoberfest at Home Assistant and gladly participate. We have gotten a lot of high quality contributions and some of these contributors also stayed and joined our core team.
We've been many years in the top contributed projects during Hacktoberfest. In earlier years spam was higher but now it's not too bad. The biggest thing that they did to reduce the spam to us was making sure our repository didn't get linked on their website.
I see a bunch of calls of people are trying to stop Hacktoberfest because it attracts people to open source and we're all so busy. But… if we get more people and we get them along as a maintainer, the long term work load can be reduced because more people are working on open source.
So instead of calls for trying to stop Hacktoberfest, let's ask for a better way to control spam. I think that the announced guide by DO to tell people to open a PR on their own repo is a good start.
And if anyone reading this is interested in participating in Hacktoberfest by improving their smart home, check out the Home Assistant Hacktoberfest blogpost[3]!
[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io [2]: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects [3]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-...