May be some open-source software becomes notable without any marketing or sales, but I constantly see a lot of very conscious effort by FOSS maintainers to popularise their work. They go to meetups, do talks, post on twitter and HN. And yet the most that majority of them can hope for is getting a boost to their resume and being hired as a distinguished staff/principal-level engineer somewhere because of their open-source clout.
The goal for maintainers who dislike the business side of things should be to write code that makes those business activities as painless as possible for the maintainer themselves. In writing such code they will develop a greater understanding of the process and may even learn to appreciate it. A true win would be to generalize that code so that other maintainers can use it to make their lives easier while still being able to glean valuable information from it.