I don't know the full context of the situation, but when you have a limited amount of time to tend to PRs, it doesn't make sense to review non functional changes. It also depends on what their testing situation is like. Are they relying on their canary users to report issues, or do they have integration tests?

There's also stuff like Hacktoberfest which used to encourage pointless PRs, and MOOCs or real courses which involve submitting PRs that often have no actual value to the project, which makes maintainers wary.

If anything it would make more sense to do it the other way around - make something useful, then once you are "in" they can wave through your non functional changes without much thought.