I greatly appreciated the wide variety of experienced maintainers of large oss projects. From webdev to desktop application. The most common sentiment here was don't contribute to open source just to contribute to open source. Bring something meaningful to the project. Find a project you like, look at the discussions/issues for work or start some discussions. If there are no meaningful features that you can add to projects that you use and love, make your own thing. Adam from tailwind really hit on this one several times. He has made tailwind extensible so that you don't have to contribute to tailwind to get new capabilities, you can probably just extend tailwind with your thing. Its likely that it makes a lot more sense or your use case, and if it turns out that it makes sense for everyone have the discussion about bringing it in. The upside to small oss projects is that you can move at whatever pace you want and break them all you want when the user base is just you. As you move your stuff into tailwind you have to be very careful not to break the massive tailwind user base and you have to bend to the release schedule of tailwind.
The other adjacent topic that kept coming back is that low effort Prs are definitely on the rise with some of the projects. Refactor PRs get automatically closed because they are likely LLM driven, bring little to no value to the project, but bring a ton of risk. Don't do this to maintiners.