But I think the projects with maintainers who bend over backwards for people are more often the ones that end up chosen and kept as dependencies when there are

But I think the projects with maintainers who bend over backwards for people are more often the ones that end up chosen and kept as dependencies when there are for example hundreds of compression libraries to choose from. You're not wrong, and that's the first mistake: the individual running a FOSS project wants to see their project succeed and willingly bends over backwards to make it so. The more you care about popularity, or even acceptance, the more vulnerable you are.