The point of this article was to address the fact that open source project rarely get good user feedback. Developers wouldn't necessarily be the person offering time to talk with users, it would be the project owner. I know open-source projects don't have traditional roles like a product owner or scrum master, but there's still somebody prioritizing a list of features that have been requested. Offering to meet with real users provides valuable insight into what they actually need. This can help with prioritizating features, and even help with making decisions about whether to approve a random PR you get for a feature you didn't put into the backlog based on whether it might make future real needs harder to achieve.