A substantial fraction of "serious" OSS is now developed by paid, fulltime contributors paid by big vendors (I work for such a company). A casual contributor has a much higher bar to overcome in terms of understanding the codebase and being able to create a useful contribution. But a typo is easy to fix and probably won't spend weeks in pull request ping pong hell.
Many repos have a sharp bifurcation between tiny PRs by passers-by and big chunky ones by the fulltimers. The space between is a desert.
> But a typo is easy to fix and probably won't spend weeks in pull request ping pong hell.
Yeah. How the maintainer(s)s of a repo respond to trivial typo fixes (real ones, not spam) is also a good way to test things / check for any weird attitudes.
Most of the time, PR's are accepted easily and swiftly. But sometimes (rarely), the response is strange or off putting.
There is the occasional PR that just sits there forever without being looked at too, which just shows the repo at that URL is dead / unmaintained. Also good to know before putting much time/effort in. ;)
Larger open source projects tend to fare better; especially well-documented projects with many small components. I can think of projects such as Django and Wine, both of which very often get small-to-medium contributions from drive-by devs who want to fix "that itch".
Many repos have a sharp bifurcation between tiny PRs by passers-by and big chunky ones by the fulltimers. The space between is a desert.