> push it to the master branch and close the PR than puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments into doing all of that for me

While I understand the sentiment I am glad I got into open source more than fifteen years ago, because it was maintainers “puppeteering” me that taught me a lot of the different processes involved in each project that would be hard to learn by myself later.

This is the Eternal September problem in disguise. That is, the personal interactions we treasure so much in small communities simply do not scale when the communities grow. If a community (or a project) grows too large then the maintainers / moderators can no longer spend this amount of time to help a beginner get up to speed.

There's a balance though. Some people want to end up with a perfect PR that gets applied, some just want the change upstream.

Most of my PRs are things where I'm not really interested in learning the ins and outs of the project I'm submitting to; I've just run into an issue that I needed fixed, so I fixed it[1], but it's better if it's fixed upstream. I'll submit my fix as a PR, and if it needs formatting/styling/whatevs, it'll probably be less hassle if upstream tweaks it to fit. I'm not looking to be a regular contributor, I just want to fix things. Personally, I don't even care about having my name on the fix.

Now, if I start pushing a lot of PRs, maybe it's worth the effort to get me onto the page stylewise. But, I don't usually end up pushing a lot of PRs on any one project.

[1] Usually, I can have my problem fixed much sooner if I fix it, than if I open a bug report and hope the maintainer will fix it.