Some people reject AI on a matter of principle. They may have a problem with the energy cost, the idea that AI companies are stealing the world knowledge for their own profit, that any use of LLMs will make you stupid, or that it does more harm than good overall. The code of conduct links to a short story by Isaac Asimov, you typically don't do that when your motives are purely technical.
If you say the quiet part out loud, the lemmings will take that as approval.
"Only thoughtful application of AI allowed" -> "Of course my usage of AI was thoughtful! My custom pi harness with 1M context project brain is very thoughtful!"
Not sure why you think this wouldn't be something they did on principle either though. Most open source projects are built on someone's personal principles: that's what motivates them to keep working.
(hence the recommendation someone's free to fork it and do the work themselves)
I care, because my personal policy is "Do whatever, but if you submit the code, you own it, and you better be able to act like you own it." And that's what you're saying their policy means. But that's not what it says, and I in fact strongly disagree with what it says. So the shear between what the words say and the "read between the lines" version is quite literally the difference between a policy I reject outright and a policy I strongly endorse.
My read is any LLM use should be opaque to them. You should be able to explain your bug find in your own words, have formatted as the project expects, not have any LLM generated comments (which trend towards being useless anyways)
The wording of the post is very clever, if you're green you read it and you say "I'm banned because I use Claude". If you're experienced enough you can read the message between the lines: "if you use LLMs, it should still have gone through your brain before it reaches mine, so I'm not turned into a meat puppet by proxy"