Yes. But we are talking about a terminal emulator. And not even about one bundled with a DE (or OS). This _should_ be exactly the type of project where people can get their first OSS programming experience.
Generally speaking, these 2 things alone are basic errors when coding proper Rust. There were also many minor issues with the PRs that it seems the maintainers attempted to work through with OP.
Unfortunately learning the basics of a language like Rust is hard. Learning how to write correct Rust is even harder (and sometimes impossible without the right background knowledge). Learning how a project expects PRs to be designed and formatted is less technical, but takes dedication and time.
These PRs are riddled with things that are just straight incorrect.
Also, generally you are right about beginners starting with easier projects like this, but as many others in these comments have stated, the general bar is not low. Projects decide how to manage PRs. Nobody is stopping you from creating a terminal emulator in Rust that caters to beginners in Open Source. My guess is that the project would not be as good as Alacritty.
Also, the maintainers of any open source project don't owe you or anyone (including contributors) anything.
What I'm talking about that you can't expect the same contributors to a critical part of infrastructure as to a, well, more or less useless terminal emulator.
You can't do the 45327th copy of something (yes, yes, I get it, it's in Rust) and behave like your project is the Linux kernel or the Rust compiler.
Yes, misleading claims about project importance would be a bad idea.
But decisions like
> This _should_ be exactly the type of project where people can get their first OSS programming
is up to maintainers, not up to random people not running this projects
Why not? A terminal emulator is probably one of the most-used apps for a lot of devs.
Plus, "useless things" can become great in time with a relentless focus on quality, understanding what their users need, and a vision for both the product and the implementation. There was a time when Linux wasn't regarded as a "real" OS, too.
Be careful of slamming unpopular projects for being unpopular. It's not a good look.
It is 100% up to maintainer of a given project, they are not obligated to do this.
People are 100% free to pursue sky-high reliability and bugfreeness in their project, no matter what it is.
Of course they are. But they should not complain that the only people interested in their project are, well, not super-star programmers but beginners.
In other words: they can wait for the other programmer who is almost ;) as perfect as they are. But chances are these people are not interested in the 4535th copy of $TOOL (if they were, they would probably write that themselves - that's why there existed 4534 versions of $TOOL).