> It's paying a bill in pennies.

This is actually a problem that is solved in German law:

§ 3 Münzgesetz (MünzG), Absatz 1 [§ 3 Coins Act, article 1]

"§ 3 Annahme- und Umtauschpflicht

(1) Niemand ist verpflichtet, deutsche Euro-Gedenkmünzen im Betrag von mehr als 200 Euro bei einer einzelnen Zahlung anzunehmen. Erfolgt eine einzelne Zahlung sowohl in Euro-Münzen als auch in deutschen Euro-Gedenkmünzen, ist niemand verpflichtet, mehr als 50 Münzen anzunehmen; dies gilt auch dann, wenn der Gesamtbetrag 200 Euro unterschreitet."

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/m_nzg_2002/__3.html

Translation based on the one created by DeepL:

"§ 3 Obligation to Accept and Exchange

(1) No one is obliged to accept German commemorative euro coins totalling more than 200 euros in a single payment. If a single payment is made using both euro coins and German commemorative euro coins, no one is obliged to accept more than 50 coins; this also applies if the total amount is less than 200 euros."

It's not even that. Downstream projects host their own mirrors already, this is an annoying hoop to jump through for the maintainers (basically suck down a bunch of tarballs for every release, analogous to grabbing stuff from FTP sites back in the day), but not exactly a terrible hardship compared to the really very significant work of maintaining a large project.