> I don’t think using AI will by itself make a big enough difference, it’s still a lot of work to maintain a project

I think you are wrong. The "a lot of work maintaining a project" would be reduced, specially issues investigation, code improvement, security issues detection and fixes. SDL isn't a that relevant project, but "ban AI-written commit" - which reading the issue, sounds more like ban "AI usage" - is counterproductive to project.

> SDL isn't a that relevant project,

SDL is kinda the king of “I want graphic, but not enough to bring a whole toolkit, or suffer with opengl”. I have a small digital audio player (shangling m0) where the whole interface is built with SDL.