I know those things must be accounted for. However I believe there’s a strong opportunity there. Many projects will accept PRs and merge them, but not take much lead on the project and soliciting particular contributions top-down, or promoting community requests into top down calls to action. And they already field PRs from people paid to produce them (a lot of open source contribution happens on company time)

I would even be happy to fund the work done in a fork until the maintainers decide or not to accept the PR. Whether the PR gets merged upstream is sometimes a secondary concern. The bounty for this work in a fork should still be advertised by community in upstream repo though (inside an issue ticket etc)