Silently trying to plow through problems of these magnitudes will cause the project to be late and still cost the same. It's bad for everyone
I am also somewhat puzzled how we are having a discussion about this on HN, where adherence to open source licenses is usually a virtue. Only as long as our work is not negatively effected, I presume?
There are a lot of people on this site. Some of them may think differently than others, there is no way to fuse them into a single persona.
The spirit of hn has clear biases and it's not equally open-minded towards all ideas.
And this is assuming there is no point manipulation at play, which is not the case for any popular site. In my opinion points alone can't be taken for more than a slight grain of salt.
In fact, at every company I've ever worked for, damaging the company's reputation by doing that would have lead to far more serious issues at work than just finding a workaround and documenting it well - and then, if suitable, contributing back to the project with something helpful.
Of course, if you included a dependency because you thought it was a good idea, and it turns out to not be a good idea, then that's a different problem. You'll have to let management know that you'll need some time to refactor the code to remove the dependency. That could be a difficult conversation, but the answer is still not "hassle the maintainer to fix my problem"
Who is proposing that it's a good idea to hassle the maintainer? Most of these interactions go awry when someone decides to be an asshole. The tone of the article which says "fuck off" demonstrates the interpersonal impulses at play here.
Choose who you rely on wisely & try not to get into bad situations. If the maintainers of project x have an ill disposition toward the community, then consider it a red flag.