> Gaming the system doesn't end up working well in the end anyway. The first time the gamers try to get a job interview and can't explain how they'd do a code review—something GitHub says they've done hundreds or thousands of times—the whole thing will fail.

Observably, it feels like they are doing this for core privileges (if they don't already exist, they are a member of the python org?). Every time I see one of those PRs (e.g add test for X, add delete redundant variables for Y), the author seem to be cc-ing their mentor. This gives a bad impression to others about their intentions (constant contribution of trivial / low quality stuff with little-to-no-gain to achieve a higher number of commits, since it is a visible metric).