I wasn’t around much before GitHub so. I believe I tried submitting patches to the XFCE project but I didn’t get anything accepted to FOSS before GitHub.

In this type of system, if I am competent and can contribute how to do I? By reviewing the maintainers PRs, helping fill out more info for bug reports / root causing?

There had to be some way for a competent user to get involved enough to become a familiar handle to the maintainers and be seen as a possible future maintainer/ expert contributor right?