Seems debatable and debated, reading through the rest of this thread.
Regardless, I'll reiterate my point more straightforwardly: it's the maintainers' prerogative to treat aspiring contributors however they like, but actions have consequences, and some of those consequences may be deleterious to a project's health.
Most of the people commenting in this thread haven't looked at the code and anyone saying the two patches are equivalent can be safely ignored. Out of the issues kazinator pointed out, 1 and 2 are definitely major issues and 3 is debatable although it is definitely suboptimal.
> some of those consequences may be deleterious to a project's health
Of course, but I think it might not be in the way the "everyone can be a valued contributor" crowd thinks.
Of course! Who will keep the hordes of dimwits and dilettantes and LinkedIn jockeys at bay, if not those whose merit has already been proven?
This is unironically a very serious problem and why most of the best open source projects are basically corporate FAANG projects that are really only open source for optics.