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All of these packaging systems have plenty of tutorials. Speaking from experience, many maintainers were not developers when they started maintaining packages for distros other than the official distros. I have worked with several maintainers who do work in tech and know socially several who had no background. This could be a great place for you to start!
You bother because FOSS is as much paying it forward as it is getting shit for free.
I am not surprised by either the author or the HN community completely missing it’s getting harder to die if and only if you can afford it or want to throw your family into crippling debt for the rest of their lives. This might be a US problem only. I rolled my eyes when the article opened with “sophisticated New Yorkers” and then completely ignored the cost all of this incurs.