It's not just about that, though. I want to avoid crushing people's hopes, yes, but in the event that they are absolutely set on submitting a PR, I don't want to have to deal with getting a notification and having to manually close it. (And no, I don't want to take the time to set up a bot to do it either. I have better things to do with my time.)

I mean, I get that, and I'm not opposed to having a method to turn off PRs. I'm just saying that if the impetus is avoiding crushing people's hopes because a README and template isn't clear enough, I think there are people that will still create an issue or send an email about why they can't submit a PR.

Then maybe those folks should get a better feature for that, too. More than one thing can be suboptimal about the same feature-as-implemented.

Totally valid, and I'm not opposed to an option to turn it off, I was just saying I can understand why some people might need to keep it on, even if they do have a README and PR template that makes it clear they don't accept PRs. I just think the "crushing the hopes of people that don't read" aspect is probably the lowest priority in that sort of situation.

That's not the only thing.

A few of those who didn't read the README, and get their PRs auto closed, might get upset at the maintainers, and write something a bit angry, making it less pleasant to be a maintainer.