Started maintaining a small library at work and now I genuinely understand why maintainers go quiet

Built a little internal utility about a year ago, open sourced it because why not, figured maybe 10 people would find it useful. It slowly picked up a few hundred stars and then the issues started coming in. Not a flood or anything but enough and what surprised me was how much of it wasn't really bugs it was people wanting features that made sense for their use case but would've made zero sense for the original scope of the thing. Or issues that were basically "your README didn't account for my specific setup." I like helping people, I thought I would enjoy this and I did at first but somewhere around month 4 I noticed I was dreading opening GitHub notifications. The AI-generated PRs made it worse honestly. Not because the code was always bad but because they'd come in with confident descriptions, look reasonable on the surface and then you'd spend 30 minutes tracing through edge cases only to realize whoever sent it hadn't actually tested it against anything real. At human contribution pace that was manageable. At "someone hit generate and submit" pace it's just a different problem. I have immense respect for maintainers of anything with serious adoption now. The people keeping libraries that half the internet depends on running are doing it mostly for free, mostly in their spare time,and mostly while dealing with issue reporters who write like they're filing a complaint with customer support. If you use open source software and it's saved you hours of work, go sponsor someone. Even a few dollars a month means something and most of these folks have a GitHub sponsors page just sitting there.