I just remembered the drama a couple weeks back about some library for coloring terminal output...

People do stupid shit for fake internet points and fame already, I wouldn't put cash into that equation

We already have put cash into the equation. There are donation buttons on many repos nowadays. Should we fight against that or should we try to make better use of it?

That should mitigate against fake dependencies, but not splitting important projects into multiple equally important projects, unless this engine also incorporated something like SLOC or number of commits (either of which would make splitting a net zero) but those are non-metrics as well...even more readily abused.

Not following what your point is here? I'm not promoting metrics. I'm just saying we should allow lifting up the whole software supply chain for donation driven projects.

Just saying how any tooling to automate the process would be easy to game all the way down, so the due diligence toward donating has really got to be a manual human effort.