Speaking from personal experience which is admittedly quite old at this point, but it used to be the case that Debian definitely didn’t go out of its way to try to pull in devs. When I had a few small open source things myself I packaged them for RedHat (this is pre-fedora when RedHat didn’t have a commercial and free version, they just had “RedHat Linux”) and looked to package them for debian, given I was actually using debian for a few of my personal servers. I made the .deb packages just fine but found the Debian community were definitely not trying to attract devs[1]. I couldn’t get anyone from Debian to sign my gpg keys which if I recall correctly was a necessary part in getting my package upstreamed[2] and in the end I just gave up on it because I’m really not interested in joining a community that is so unwelcoming.

[1] although it was maybe specifically just me they weren’t trying to attract.

[2] to the point where I actually worked with someone in my day job who was a debian dev and he wouldn’t sign my key without me producing physical official ID like a passport or something. Just really bizarre level of paranoia like a government kyc process or something.