Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:
Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:
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Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
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Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay^[sic]^ on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
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OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. [This drives away users as a result.]
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That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back. [return to step 1]
As a consequence of the slop-nami, I'd argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:
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The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.
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As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsync's broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linux's recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.