You don't need Drama, but you should indeed communicate and deliver something worth the peoples' money. I mean, there are many big and small creators who just steadily and silently deliver their work and have usually no drama at all.
Drama is just popular because it's cheap, fast, and any idiot can create it. So people who have nothing else of worth, tend to live from this.
Entertainers have been doing the pass the hat thing for hundreds of years. It is not a new phenomenom.
Historically, it has generally worked for entertainers, and i guess religion. I don't think there are historical paralells to open source really. Maybe it just doesn't work for that sort of thing.
And when there's 15 people watching, that does enable real conversations.
Maybe that is not the same as pretending to be your friend but then again that mostly applies only to the more extreme end of streamers.
> Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator
This is ultimately a polite way of saying that the "author" (which can be a content creator, a OSS maintainer) needs to establish a parasocial relationship, use a self-aggrandizing approach, and create drama to entertain its users.
This does work for content creators on Youtube, Patreon or Onlyfans, but ultimately detracts from the mission of delivering quality content that is useful or positively entertaining for the consumers of said content. The fans created in this way can go on to defend your failings or can be taken advantage of in a weakness, as can be seen in the case of the LTT sexual harassment allegation case and the health situation of Physics Girl.
However, I see no way for this to work in an open-source project, because users of an open source project mostly care about the functionality provided. Creating a parasocial relationship is mostly not viable in this space due to limited interaction, as you pointed out.
I've seen a few instances of OSS project maintainers using a chest-thumping, holier-than-thou approach to create drama, and said projects have either mostly become irrelevant over time or the open source project has continued to get attention only because the character of the maintainer has been buried and not well known to most.