The amount of work required to maintain a very popular package is obviously higher, even without taking into account any distribution part. From your message it sounds like you expect same amount of work. Besides, the extra work from this side would pale to the extra amount of work needed to maintain just due to increase of users.

Yes, that's the status-quo. But OP is arguing, rightfully so, that we don't want to put additional responsibilities to already hand-full maintainers. If anything, we want to reduce that to make open source community more sustainable. We've seen too much that maintainers burnt out, shutdown repos, or beg for money to just keep the light on. Once they turned the project into commercial endeavor to "spread" the burden, then they have the dilemma of "open-core" dual license.

There must be a way to make the extra work minimal for maintainers even if their works are popular. For example, in the days people use apt / yum for distribution, both vetting and packaging are the responsibilities of the packagers, not the maintainers. (Not saying that's good, but just an alternative perspective, there is a reason why language-specific package registry wins today).

> EDIT: to respond to the reply below, I realize that the amount of effort scales with the popularity of the project, but nobody joins the basketball team to warm the bench, you know? Why would I join a system where the definition of success is unpleasant to me?

I'm pretty sure {your favorite popular basketball player}'s career prospects would not have been impacted by an NBA requirement to "spend 10 seconds sitting on the bench to warm it every day before playing". Doubly so if there was a reasonable argument that it would somehow make the stadium safer for their fans.

Volunteering is all about taking responsibility. If you contribute regularly to a project with many users, you can't avoid the responsibility. If you only want to express yourself by writing code without the burden of responsibility, you should contribute to something else.

One thing I've learned from various volunteer projects and organizations is that good volunteer administrators are rare. Finding good people for the creative parts of the project is not particularly difficult, because creative work is inherently satisfying. Administrators are another story. Many try the job and quit, because they don't enjoy it enough to do it in their free time. Others are not suitable for the role. Some are good and motivated administrators, but they drive other volunteers away by trying to manage them. And then there are the rare ones who can be administrators and enjoy it without ruining the project for everyone else. If you manage to find one, the last thing you want to do is increasing their burden.

As far as I understand, PyPI is largely a volunteer project. It works only because some people find running that kind of bureaucracy satisfying. It's their project, and they can run it any way they want. If their burden gets too heavy, they may quit, and then the project may fail. That would probably be a bigger issue than some open source contributors not liking how PyPI is run.