I think that every open source project used by thousands of people should have person like Bram. Who will draw a line and separate low quality or effort PRs. Many hate it and call them dictators, but that's just taking care of your own project, and keeping it at the highest standard.
“Keep me alive” [1]
[1] https://www.binpress.com/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-intervie...
https://github.com/vim/vim/graphs/contributors
Other than one solitary commit, that graph makes it look like every single one of the 13,000 commits to Vim has been made by Bram. What's going on there?
Incidentally I wondered what caused the huge jump in commits that has been sustained since the beginning of 2016. I thought initially that may have coincided with the announcement of Neovim, but that announcement seems to have been a couple of years earlier. Maybe it took a couple of years for Neovim to see significant adoption though.
I like this approach better than GitHub “everyone send us a PR”. These days having a “change a typo” PR to show activity on GitHub is appealing to masses, but mailing list sifts out people who don’t have anything serious to add = less work in managing open source project. As we can see lot’s of maintainers have a problem with that, and users that demand stuff (at least once a month there’s a topic about it on HN). :-)