I know someone who submits PRs to large open source projects at the beginning of the year to update forgotten copyright values in their codebases in order to get listed as a contributor on github. It's a bit tongue in cheek but on first glance their open source contributions look pretty impressive...

Can just put [first publish]-[now] and save yourself the trouble.

That depends on whether each year until [now] had "copyrightable" improvements. For large open source projects, the copyright notice is placed on each file separately, and it is common to see some files not changing (or changing negligibly) over long periods of time.

Sounds much more like a feature, not a whole product IMO.

That's a hard sale to make around source control. I've written that script a half dozen times over the years, it's a few hours of work and the vast majority of the effort is in tailoring it to the particulars of the project.

Maybe it'd work as a plugin to a content management system.