As the Zig maintainer so patiently explained, no amount of "polish" can fix the PR because it is misaligned to the correctness that they require.
IOW, that PR is so far off the reservation, unless it is completely rewritten, it won't be accepted.
Rewriting PRs with LLMs is cheap, but often the output is no better than the previous revision (fixing one issue only to cause another one is very common IME). And reviewing each revision of the PR is not cheap.
I've had good experiences with people submitting AI generated PRs who then actually take the time to understand what's going on and fix issues (either by hand or with a targeted LLM generated fix) that are brought up in review. But it's incredibly frustrating when you spend an hour reviewing something only to have someone throw your review comments directly back at the LLM and have it generate something new that requires another hour of review.
In this case it looks like the answer is "Yes"; the PR was not dismissed immediately, it was first examined in great detail!
Why would the maintainer expend effort on something that was going to be rejected anyway?
I don't understand this PoV - have you ever come across a policy in any environment that wasn't subject to case-by-case exceptions?
Even in highly regulated environments (banking/fintech, Insurance, Medical, etc), policies are subject to exceptions and exemptions, done on a case-by-case basis.
The notion, in this specific case, that "well they rejected it because of policy" is clearly nonsense and I don't understand why people are pushing this so hard when the explanation of why an exemption can't be made for this specific PR is public, accessible and, I feel, already public knowledge.