I made the mistake of making the Python module that handles Microsoft Word files (python-docx) about a decade ago. Despite including a bunch of examples for making, reading, and modifying documents, right in the README, I received a bunch of emails from India demanding I help them. I eventually passed the project onto someone else (not entirely because of this, I also started more involved with node at the time, but this was definitely part of it).

I think I know the type of interactions you mean, and I wonder whether it's a cultural thing or a language issue of which I am not aware: I have received a bunch of e-mails from strangers telling me something along the lines of "I request you to do X", where X is something related to a project of mine. I always tried to see this as a sample of "inexperienced person not expressing themselves politely." It's the most charitable explanation, but maybe someone else with more knowledge about the cultural differences can comment on this?

Some people are just completely shameless about demanding that somebody else fixes their problems for free.

I maintain a few small OSS projects and most of the interactions I have with people are pretty pleasant and respectful. However, my inbox is a dumpster fire of recruiter spam (both trying to recruit and offering their services to me), and incompetent idiots trying to sell me whatever. And indeed the occasional support request. It's infrequent enough that I usually reply if people are articulate and coherent enough (which is a problem with some of this).

Otherwise, I have a pretty simple strategy for all this: I don't dignify people with a response unless I understand what they want and it adds value for me. Simply, not worth my time and energy.

Repeat offenders get blocked and marked as spam. There's no point in me getting upset or angry about any of this. Just the price of doing business these days. In the same way I ignore the dozens of attempts at connect attempts on linkedin. If I don't know who you are and you don't have a coherent reason as to why we should connect, I'm going to ignore you. Buzzword compatibility doesn't count.