Nobody wants to spend time researching other people's code and writing a patch only to see that effort go to waste. In this case, the fact that the bug is close

Nobody wants to spend time researching other people's code and writing a patch only to see that effort go to waste. In this case, the fact that the bug is closed and marked as WONTFIX is a strong indication that patches would not be accepted. Before people can get to code, the maintainers would at least have to say "we've only marked this as WONTFIX because we don't have the resources to deal with this, but we'd actually like to see this fixed if someone else provided a patch". But they haven't said that.