That is a good point indeed.

I am wondering though if that was really the world we were living in just before chatGPT launched, given that the whole OSS thing was already harvested super hard.

The "mentoring opportunities" often were just extracting free consulting out of experts + building a portfolio for getting hired by big tech.

Would we really want to go back to that?

So I agree with the idea but only in a vacuum, I think.