I dunno man, the whole thing seemed overblown to me. They quickly reacted by correcting the participation rules to avoid problems. The whole thing is opt-in now.
When you are hurting the community you are pretending to help[1], and refuse to listen to them[2], then it's definitely a bad thing. Remember that most popular OSS devs are already walking a fine line, adding an extra burden to them is Not Nice™ IMHO.
The year that this blew up the DigitalOcean team (I was on this team) met with nearly 100 open source maintainers over the course of weeks to ask their opinions on Hacktoberfest and how we could make it better. We opened up these roundtables to anyone who would attend, and had great attendance from major projects such a Kubernetes, CPython, Gentoo, and others. We took all of this feedback and immediately changed the program. Many maintainers in the community have lauded us for these changes both publicly and in private.
We did listen to the community and we made the program better.
