I think it's normal to be pissed at lost data. Maybe it's not socially acceptable to spit in the face of a volunteer but it's 100% human to feel annoyed by an obvious drop in code quality.
1) they stop volunteering
2) they will ignore you
In neither of that is your issue solved. So maybe it's better to deal with the frustration on your own and then file a bug report.
Poor communication results in professionals firing the customer as well. None of this is exclusive to OSS of volunteer effort. But the communication in general is necessary.
This is just product management and communication issues. There is an perceived problem and the problem MUST be communicated.
Problems aren't solved by shutting up and ignoring things. And based on the discussion in this topic, it's clear there's a lot of people who are worried about rsync code quality here.
This doesn't seem egregious enough to fire the customer.
This is somebody spending their free time on code they enjoy and then putting the result online.
The reason businesses are careful about which customers they fire is because they want to keep having customers. Open source maintainers have no reason to deal with that shit.
Again: we are talking about rsync here. This new methodology being used this year seems to be associated with a regression (ie: Data loss since this is rsync after all....) that likely wouldn't have happened any other year.
Or at least: the regressions at play are consisting of thousands of lines of changes that was only navigated by Claude later down in the discussion.
We are reaching the point of AI developed code that requires AI itself to analyze. One step at a time. It's right for the open source customers who are used to understanding changes and smaller patches than this.
Otherwise, you're just a beggar. And beggars don't get to choose.
Why are you hedging this? Do you think maybe it is socially acceptable?
Then egos got bruised and things leave the realm of reason soon after. But coming with a request saying "Version X worked while version Y doesn't", with maybe some degree of annoyance, is fine.