> how a normal person can become a maintainer though.

Is the goal to produce high-quality software, or is the goal to produce an apprenticeship scheme for developers who are interested in the project but not so interested that they are willing to write an email to introduce themself or otherwise engage in normal human social interactions?

Normal people will still be able to get involved if they want to, just like normal people can get jobs. You learn about the organization you’re interested in joining, you try to meet some people and introduce yourself, you gain trust and prove your worth. It can be true that a pull request once embodied some of these tasks, but it is not true that being unable to submit a request means that these tasks are no longer possible to perform. It just means you’ll have to do them differently, just like the rest of humanity does when they want to get involved in an organization.

The path is not closed; it must be earned through trust. It has always been this way. Also, note that "pull requests" are a GitHub invention; the concept is not native to Git or most other SCM systems. Before, you would have to submit your patch by email. It would be reviewed by the "maintainer" (or BDFL), who would then accept or reject it. If your contributions are accepted several times, you may be able to earn the rank of "maintainer."

Returning to the topic at hand, the challenge for new developers is to earn trust. I bet there are ways to do so aside from the muddy swamp of GitHub's (AI) bazaar.

Just uh.. build your own thing?

Boom. Maintainer. Easy.

Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff?