In that case, you clone and fork. If you're just trying to get your stuff working, your fork is private. If instead you're trying to enjoy publicity, you publicize your fork. In neither case is it necessary to annoy someone who has already done a lot of free work for you.
This isn't a serious response. As amply demonstrated in TFA and elsewhere, the harassment was far more than "reporting bugs".
And, anyway, yes, reporting bugs can be extremely annoying. Different devs respond to this annoyance differently. npm devs, for example, have decided not to pay too much attention to bugs reported by the public. [0]
Strangely, I would rather deal with developers who find bug reports annoying than folks who simply ignore them. The former have a touch of pride and you have a chance to get them to see your point of view. Better that than speaking to a black-hole.
I honestly dont understand people being mad at this. Every dependancy I use I don't like 100% I fork and modify and then upstream changes, and if they never get merged, who cares?
If there was a big user community that wanted different things, fork and have a seperate maintainer structure. Why drama?
A huge number of npm dependancies I use are basically unmaintained, have tons of forks and multiple PRs with the same fixes. I choose the one I like and move on, the magic of github!