> but I have never seen any maintainer close down their project due to a manually made "volumous onslaught of new contributions".

Maybe machines can have much higher "volumes" than humans? That's certainly what we've heard happening in many projects.

> Most maintainers even strive once their project takes off and they get many contributions, even if it means they cannot personally keep pace.

Source for "Most"? There are many stories about orphaned projects too.

> The preamble reads like maintainers mainly struggle due to the alleged increased productivity of the software world. I reject that premise.

Software productivity is measured in terms of features added and bugs fixed - AFTER careful review, testing and release without backslash. Not in terms of lines of code merely submitted.

In fact, _reducing_ code size (while not removing or regressing any feature) thanks to de-duplication and code-reuse is always the most productive thing. Assuming good test coverage, these submissions are the easiest to review. How good are LLMs for those?