Is that a future we want? I would much rather work towards a future where everyone makes enough at their day job and can work on passion projects on the side.
Why are we okay with the idea that in order to get by, we should have to do work in our supposed off time as well? Uber/etc love to bring up the fact that it's often their drivers' second job, as a defense of their independent contractor status and pay. Which is, to me, a pretty damning indictment of how we've structured our society.
How is that good?
However, if people were getting paid for fixing bugs and cleaning up old code, maybe that'd improve.
Big new headline features are a marketers wet dream.
"We fixed that annoying bug that affected 4 people last year" not so much.
Also, "driving for uber" is hardly a great thing to aspire to.
It appears they leverage Bountysource (not familiar with it).
Complaints are publicity. They bump internet discussions, create buzz, and often go along with protestations of 'I really love (FooBazBar), I promise it's the best thing ever, now if you would only fix this bug…' and then angry flames over the bugs and defenders coming to protect the honor of FooBazBar.
Fix bugs and people are happy and stop talking. They return to happily using the product. Again, we're talking perverse incentives for just the sort of obnoxious behavior you describe, or worse.
It seems like one possible future here is that open source becomes less like passion projects that scratch an itch and more like driving for Uber.
Maybe that is good. Maybe GitHub just took a step toward becoming Fiverr. I really don't know.