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.