You need to go back to the roots of open source. Fork it, merge your two changes, remove 90% of code you don't need, rename it, write article about speed up in the new successor vs the old thing.
(I suspect the answer ends up being no, but the reasons could be interesting)
So, yeah. I'd guesstimate this model was fine 75% of the time, mediocre 15-20%, and actively bad 5-10% of the time. How valuable it is depends on how much energy you can spare as a human on spotting the bad.
The key to the success is dealing with the outstanding merges by bringing maintainers onboard that are trying to contribute, build up the team and then the merges will get processed a lot faster.
For traffic, more users note that the highway is easier to drive on and come over. Would people notice development speeding up and start adding more issues?