Not enough people contribute to OSS because of fear of taking the first step. This is a nice nudge towards getting used to the workflow and demystifying how the experience should go.
Also a clever use of a bot to teach coding. Very meta.
I'd say you're right. I've been coding for about 6 years and only submitted my first PR on GitHub earlier this year. It was pretty confusing and I think I did some things wrong. I've been using git for about 5 years but there's a whole culture thing around OSS on GitHub I didn't (don't?) understand.
Sometimes maintainers haven't taken my bug reports seriously because I still use the default avatar. Apparently that's important.
When I made bug reports explaining the exact issue, the maintainers would ask me for a PR. I felt this was strange because instead of them changing one line of code the next time they were working on the project they were asking me to clone the project, go hunting for the appropriate code to change and worry about any adverse effects from that change. All those things would be a non-issue for someone familiar with the code of the project. I'm talking about very straightforward issues here. Sometimes they would even ask me for a PR to fix a typo in documentation, which is just ridiculous for going through all the above steps when they could just type one letter the next time they were developing on the project. I have since learned that there is a culture of people wanting to build up their contribution rep, or something, so the maintainers were actually just offering the PR as an opportunity.
There have been other things that I can't think of right now.
Also a clever use of a bot to teach coding. Very meta.