> That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.

The solution is quite simple really.

1) have your repo private and release only tarball files or have a read only repo with no pull/merge request functionnality 2) do not use an issue tracker

Basically, do not use a forge such as github/gitlab, at least not publicly. Problem solved.