Maintainers are sometimes not perfect. But they are providing known value, and you are trying to add something with unknown value. That's an asymmetry which doesn't look like a mutual exchange. So I'd downgrade most of the hard obligations you describe to "it's really smart to do this."

I agree with the behavioral observations. People shouldn't be assholes just because they can. That applies to everyone everywhere. Reminding someone with a bit of power to not be a petty tyrant is fine with me.

I find code I wrote that violates advice I've given other people all the time. I've made release cycle mistakes on projects I maintain that I would have bet money a few years ago that you'd never catch me making.

The siren song of One More Commit or One More PR is out there, and there's always going to be some fraction of your work you do that in retrospect you should have slept on, maybe twice. (I recently fixed a problem I've been staring at for a year in an afternoon after a new, stupidly simple solution presented itself on a walk)

But there are lines, and you have to be careful not to go across them either too far or too often. Or you have to be utterly indispensable like Linus, and have a thick skin to criticism... like Linus. And if you have a thick skin to criticism you don't write long screeds about how everyone else is wrong and you're right. You just move on.