It's never fine to be rude.

Moving off github into a more niche platform was the best choice I have ever made to curb such zero-effort issue and feature requests. It raises the barrier just enough.

On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping. I participated in projects where the approach is to start a discussion on a forum first, and I get the same feeling you have as a tech guy calling ISP support on the phone.

The discussion requirement is often to prevent disappointment, waste of time, and anger, when maintainers simple close PRs, because it's not the direction they want the project to go. A lot of people will take this very personally, so it's much better to have a conversation about it beforehand.

> On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping

Seems like a completely appropriate way to handle things if you're still on Github. You said yourself the spam drove you off.

They could let people who are proven not to be spammers open PRs directly.