> Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff?

Social validation. Or, to be slightly more generous, sort of a compulsory way to force someone more experienced to provide some mentorship, by compelling them to review your pull requests.

That’s the point here, though. The maintainers of Ladybird don’t want to be compelled to mentor people making throwaway contributions without a commitment to the project. It’s pretty frustrating to try to mentor an absentee mentee who isn’t actually ready to learn from you.