As someone on the other side of the PR, the current situation makes things awkward for me, too. Occasionally, I'll make an actual fix to scratch some particular itch I have with the software, and I'm hesitant to even open a PR, because it's just going to 1. pile yet another PR onto the maintainer, and 2. might get dismissed out of hand because it's mistaken for AI slop or other low-effort spam that these attackers are doing. So, I usually just fork, make the change in my own repo, and leave it at that.
Disabling PRs or limiting PRs to "contributors" would be a signal to me that I should just keep doing that and not contribute back to the main repo.
Disabling PRs or limiting PRs to "contributors" would be a signal to me that I should just keep doing that and not contribute back to the main repo.