It's not really, because you now have the cost of maintaining that fork, even if it's just for yourself.

Which is still true in our brave new llm world.

That may be part of the issue. Perhaps LLMs are just causing people to reveal how much they consider a maintainer as providing a service for them. Maintainers don't work for you, they let you benefit from the service they perform.

That workload of maintaining a fork doesn't come from nowhere, it's just a workload someone else would have to do before the fork occured.

I'm talking about the literal process of forking an open source project. You're just making a copy of a set of files.