I feel like there is a lot of articles lately that call for empathy towards oh so ever poor and overworked and burned out maintainers. All true, but this is only half of an issue.
The issue is that the concept often brandished in those articles, empathy, is a two-way street. There are maintainers on one side of this, and there are, on the other hand, users, who often are integrating multiple software projects and products to produce a solution of some kind. Mind you, those users are not always entitled prima donnas at FAANGs making another service to track you or something inconsequential like an online game. Sometimes they are integrating stuff at your local ISP. Or it's some system at a local school. Or they are making systems that are just means to an end, like in a hospital, or a bakery, or whatnot. Or it's an automotive shop. You get the idea; the world doesn't run on cat pics alone, and sometimes a complex software system is just an ingredient.
And you know what? When integrating all this stuff, you end up not with that small insignificant bug in that one project, but with multiple bugs in many pieces of software that have all to work together and be reliable. You also deal with not so much bugs per se as impedance mismatches that you have to paper over. It really ends up bleeding from a thousand cuts.
"Fix it yourself" is possible, but it doesn't scale. Upstream doing it scales.
And before you tell me, "well if you're so upset then don't use it", or "nobody owes you anything so fuck you", I have to say that it works the other way too.
I get a feeling that many open source software maintainers get into this business because they think that either a big company is going to pay them dearly, or their résumé will be stellar, or that they will become rockstars and get all the bitches from it. And when harsh reality sinks in, they start writing about being overworked and burned out. Not every maintainer does it, but many do, or at least it looks like it.
And if you get burned out and whatnot, you have an option to just stop working on stuff that is deteriorating your health. Walk away. If a popular project is hinging on an unhealthy development model and is going to die if you walk away, so be it! The market will cope, believe you me. The community will find a way around it. What is not good, though, is if you, the maintainer, are burned out, or overworked, but stubbornly insist on being a bottleneck in the project under your inept stewardship nevertheless, and just whine and moan about your burnout to get internet points and worldwide pity.