The rest of this page makes me think it would be really hard to work with Matt, and I'd probably just pass back when I was running projects. It's not worth the effort.
What items on the list do you think are just the author's preferences, but other potential contributors wouldn't like? It seems unlikely that contributors would prefer NOT to know if the maintainer doesn't want PRs, or would prefer NOT to have an example of how to contribute, e.g.
I don't know how many times in the post they say some variation of "it's your stuff, do whatever you want", but it's certainly more than once. While they didn't explicitly say it (again) in this particular sentence, "do what you want" is repeated enough times throughout the page that it's pretty clear that nothing on this page is a "demand".
"You provide an amazing service and I want to help. But part of helping is I need to understand what is it that you would like me to do."
Is a pretty reasonable take. I don't know how that translates to "really hard to work with", but, in their own words: "It's your project, you are welcome to do with it whatever you want".
> "Let's have a conference to discuss how to help them!"
> "We should provide resources without adding requirements."
> "But how do we do that without more funding or time?"
> "Let's ask the maintainers what they need!"
> Maintainers: "We need more support and less pressure!"
> "Great! We'll discuss this at the next conference!"
> "We need to support open-source maintainers better!"
Maybe some maintainers should be invited to these conferences? And maybe more direct communication with the projects you want to contribute to? I get the impression from the article that these conferences the author describes are more virtue signalling than an attempt to solve the issue.
I do think that advice at the end of the article is useful, but the opening makes me feel that no one's actually having a conversation with maintainers.