If people were adept at consistently setting their boundaries, in the face of demands that can be overwhelming, indeed the problem would be trivial maybe. Just say no.

But just saying no for many people is still a non-trivial skill.

Also, just saying no in the face of consistent and repeated demands while mixing that with a desire that many creators have to be responsive to the people who use their software and to satisfy those people to some extent, compounds the difficulties creators face.

I definitely think it's an obvious opportunity to bring more order and structure to these currently ambiguously defined exchanges. I believe we can do better than stress and ambiguity on either side of that.

Sure, one solution is creators just saying, "I don't want to do this right now," so just shut it down, close it, block them whatever, heh. I actually think that that's not as much of a general purpose solution as it looks like at first because creators do actually want to help people with their stuff, and they also want to get rewarded for doing so (because you know they need to eat and everything), and doing so actually takes a lot of time, and they also want to control their taskflow to some extent.

I think a solution would be to not make one's contact information public, or limit the channel that can be used to get in contact.

Trouble with that is creators use Issues / Discussions / PRs to collaborate with people.