> has nothing to do with open source

I partially disagree. It does have to do with open source: Github (et al) are about creating a community around an open source project. It's hard to get adoption without a community; it gives you valid bug reports, use cases you didn't think of, and patches.

You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

> and is not sustainable

I 100% agree. People (including people at for profit companies) are taking advantage of the communities that open source maintainers are trying to build and manipulating guilt and a sense of duty to get their way.

The most insidious burnout I see is in disorganized volunteer communities. A volunteer is praised for jumping in with both feet, pushes themselves really hard, is rewarded vocally and often and with more authority, and is often the one applying the most pressure to themselves. There's no supervisor to tell them to pace themselves. And when their view switches from idealistic to realistic and then falls into pessimistic, they view the environment through a toxic lens.

Then they vanish.

> You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

Literally you cannot, you can turn off "Issues", but you cannot turn of pull requests, Microsoft/GitHub forces you to leave that open for others to submit PRs to your repositories no matter what you want.

> You can, if you want, turn off PRs, issues, and literally any feedback from the outside world. But most people don't want that.

Just a note, you actually can't turn off PR's on Github repos. At least not permanently.

Yea, and before we got issue trackers quite commonly issues and code chunks were shared via email lists that quite commonly had online archives. Think things kind of like the LKML.