It's also not uncommon that a 10-line local hack that took an hour or two total to figure out and implement mutates into a 200-line pull request that eventually

It's also not uncommon that a 10-line local hack that took an hour or two total to figure out and implement mutates into a 200-line pull request that eventually gets merged after 3 months of near-daily babysitting and 7 rounds of review with 10-deep email threads because the initial approach wasn't quite up to standard and the project maintainers have meant to redo the code in this area for a while now anyway, so could you just… Or, you know, somewhere along that path, you give up, for reasons which can be anywhere between frivolous/laziness and entirely reasonable. If you're lucky, your change is sufficiently googlable that one of the next people who need it comes along and cleans it up and goes through with the full merge dance before upstream has diverged too far from your abandoned patch.