Allowing people to help also takes time...there's a non-trivial management effort involved...one that's too frequently forgotten about in these discussions.
This is very true. Even when collaborating with very skilled engineers, it takes a lot of time and energy to respond to ideas, questions, and review PRs. It’s like a regular programming job to a certain degree, but you’re typically not paid for doing it.
Software can be shitty garbage in many ways. It can be shitty garbage by having lots of bugs, and it can be shitty garbage by having a maintainer which cares more about bottlenecking all changes than about the future of a project.
But everyone is free to make shitty software, so have at it.
Wow, calling people's software shitty because they care enough about it to want to vet contributions?