It's dismissive because most of the requests open source developers get need to be dismissed.
"Where can I send some cash for your hard work" is much rarer than "Here's my very complex edge use case that I need to support ASAP, I think it's quite shameful you don't support this already must not take you more than 5 minutes, come on people do it already my clients are waiting".
It would be, if it were true. I'm not going to cast the entirety of a very large community in a single light, but there are great deal of people in the open source community who are afraid of money, or more specifically, that someone else might be making some, especially using open source code that they didn't personally hand write.
Another symptom is most projects don't have an easy way to donate money to them.
see, that's the problem, you immediately jump to a combative stance + assume the current maintainer is always right, which is exactly how the situations i presented happen in the first place
The current maintainer is always right by definition, has put in the hard work and is entitled to drag the project into whatever deranged fantasy they might have.
You just don't get a vote, there is no objective truth to settle disputes when it comes to someone else's work and projects. You can stop using the work or fork it, perhaps alongside other like minded users and contributors, crating a viable split.
"Where can I send some cash for your hard work" is much rarer than "Here's my very complex edge use case that I need to support ASAP, I think it's quite shameful you don't support this already must not take you more than 5 minutes, come on people do it already my clients are waiting".