if someone wants to contribute, they need to prove they produce value to the project. I dont think this is controversial at all.

The fact of being open source means if your contributions are rejected, you simply need to fork. The open market competition will soon determine if your contributions were truly valuable and whether the original project's owner misjudged, or that contribution was essentially worthless.

I agree with fellow commenter, now with LLM the forks will NOT been distinguished as much by their technical differences/features as their trustworthiness (which is already the case today, but tomorrow will be skewed even more). Massively increasing inertia and favouring initial/well-known work/founder/team.

That's not entirely true: my work might get zero traction because nobody will know about it.

Not really, even if you have a great improvement, you need to spend the overhead to keep it up to date long enough to gain traction.

Then marketing it to convince others to even try... If the idea is too niche it might never hit that threshold for uptake.