I usually bring up this research when talking about employee onboarding but there was a study done in 2015 (with Mozilla) that showed a “good first issue” approach didn’t actually lead to the intended outcome - having more folks successfully integrate into and continue to contribute to a project over a long term. To my knowledge there hasn’t been a ton of follow up or replication but still something to consider.
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~rtholmes/papers/msr_2015_labuschagn...