I don’t think that changes the project independence, when a project is open to PRs you have the same dependency on maintainers accepting changes into main. And the project is still open source. But that does make it less community oriented
Unfortunately AI tools are breaking the open community dynamics, it has become more and more expensive to run open community oriented projects due to the noise, it’s really a shame. It’s a lot to expect volunteer project members to triage the increasing amount of AI garbage
And submitting a PR is almost wholly dissimilar from a conversation between friends over dinner or drinks. If you want to have a community around an open source project, it always has taken more than just accepting patches.