Goodhart's law, again.

I feel like 1/10 comment I make on HN are about this.

So merged PR were until LLMs a good proxy for the ability to code and contribute to a software project. Consequently they were used to estimate if a candidate was potentially good for a position. Merged PR on popular project were thus precious credentials one could "trade" for potential work. Since then the desire to provide PR changed from contributing to a project for its own sake, to make the actual project progress, to signalling.

A new proxy must be found to establish the ability to contribute to a project.