I can imagine there’s a “right” amount of this sort of thing. Like, if you work on a project doesn’t have much traction, it can be nice to have the people using it meeting up and talking about it. It can keep energy and motivation high. And hearing what people are working on (with demos) is a blast.

On the flip side, if you work on a project that’s already popular, you don’t want to be spending all your time doing free Q&A. Especially not for enterprise folks who have money but aren’t paying anyway. This is how maintainer burnout happens.

There’s a sweet spot here, which will vary by project and by maintainer.