> They have a prioritization problem

This is what forks are for. Alternately, money would probably help. Otherwise it's a bit rude to impose your priorities on others.

Perhaps some larger projects lose track of what they intended to prioritize. This is also a resources problem. There's nobody available to do management (and probably also not a social structure internally that would allow for it).

> because of how "impure" the fix is despite being entirely cosmetic, also being reversible and having no long term impact on maintenance.

The developers will always be in a better position than end users to assess the long-term maintenance impact.