Most of my PRs are drive-by PRs: I have an problem, maybe a bug or missing feature, that annoyed me enough to fix it. And because I want to use future versions without the work of maintaining a fork I instead invest the work to upstream the fix. A step that is sometimes more work than the fix itself. At that point I wouldn't mind paying $1 to get that PR looked at and merged.

But that is not the only type of PR. We clearly need escape hatches for people who engage with a project on a deeper level.