I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.

But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.

There's no such thing as bad publicity. If people who didn't know about your product become angry about your product, they're more likely to buy it.

100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.

I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors