Most maintainers are volunteers, but not all volunteers are maintainers…

Besides the obvious non-package work, if you make a single pr for some random package and never again, you’re not a maintainer.

The Nix ecosystem is developed by many volunteers and a few paid developers, maintaining one of the largest open source software distributions in the world.

demanding work that we cannot expect to be done by volunteers indefinitely.

https://nix.dev/contributing/how-to-contribute.html