The hacktoberfest used to be cool, people contributing meaningfully to projects.
Now it’s a rush to who will make the trashiest PR, adding a space here in a readme, adding an unrelated file to your repo…
Once again I won’t be participating, as a maintainer nor as a contributor (didn’t participate last year as I got more and more trashy pr until the 2022 edition when I decided it was enough).
I've not seen those kinds of issues. Apart from some dedicated pseudo-/farm-projects.
But still, it has entirely lost its appeal or even viability to me.
I participated many years, until - I presume - it got too big. I was not able to find good projects, the contributions I made most of the time were not reviewed nor labeled hacktoberfest-accepted. An an extrinsic motivator, it became more frustrating than motivating.