For a couple months? Not a big deal

Nobody said doing it yourself was neccesarily easy. Its just an option that is there.

You don’t need to backport other people’s fixes. You only need to re-merge your patches into updated versions of the upstream (aka vendor branch), which usually is straightforward.

Maybe you mean that if there are many people like you, they’d want to integrate each other’s fixes. But then you’d probably have the combined manpower to start maintaining a true fork.