Reading 2k+ commits is a big waste of time.

Forcing yourself to read every commit to a project you "like" in order contribute to it is putting the cart before the horse. Just because you "like" a project doesn't mean you will have the skills to contribute usefully to it. This isn't a bad thing. I "like" GCC, but I don't have the skills to contribute to it. I'm not losing any sleep over this, and I'm definitely not thinking about reading every commit to GCC in chronological order.

If you use a project, you might find a bug or some deficiency in it. Then it might happen that you have the skills to quickly fix this problem. Either that, or this bug causes you so many problems or slows you down so much that it becomes worth it for you to develop the skills to fix the problem.

I like this approach to FOSS contributions, thanks for the answer, sfpotter.

I'm not sure why GP's post is upvoted so much, IMO it's a bad way to learn. I would instead find an entry point, a self-contained task that doesn't touch a lot of the codebase that you can use to learn something. Then, as you get more comfortable with some part of the codebase you can expand your scope by looking at tasks that touch other things. In general reading code is 50% of the work, the other 50% is to play with the codebase or try to make changes to it and see what happens.

That sounds reasonable, and I do agree that inching forward seems like a more viable approach to contributing in FOSS.

Thanks for the answer.