That sort of patch is clearly fixing something that blocked him, and probably blocked many others who didn't get as far as trying to fix it.

A project should take on useful small patches, thats how you onboard contributors.

That again assumes a project is looking to onboard contributors.

I absolutely get that it was an unfortunate interaction from the email writer's perspective, and it's really unfortunate.

But there are a lot of concerns/bureaucracy, etc in case of large projects like this. It may just never got to the person responsible, because it is a cross-cutting concern (so no clear way to assign it to someone) with a low priority.