(Easy) ways to help struggling open source projects

step in and help review a few PRs
help the project triage/reproduce bugs
if code in the PR looks complicated or is hard to understand, ask for an explanation
express your gratitude to the maintainers
make your company sponsor projects they depend on

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Make your company sponsor projects they depend on
Definitely worth trying to do, but making my employer do anything isn’t likely!

I personally think you should move the fourth bullet (express your gratitude to the maintainers) to the first position in your list. But a great, simple list none-the-less.

is "step in and help review a few PRs" really that helpful? like... oh great, now this one person that i don't trust is telling me that the other person that i don't trust made some code that i should merge
- How does one become trusted? If they regularly review and provide feedback that you agree with it can really speed up the process, even if you're still double checking.
  
  Exactly. At first it means nothing. Over time they can begin to trust you.

If the project has a community forum or chat, be active and help answer questions. That takes a lot of pressure off the dev team. I did that for 4-5 years on the Handbrake project before family commitments ate up my free time.
- I myself am a maintainer/main developer of a project and the people that help out in the group chat are a god sent. Takes a lot of pressure out of my day.
- Cool. Good suggestion.

Sometimes an open source project is too niche for anyone to take notice. I myself am developing a networking reliability layer ported from C to modern C++ and I've yet to see a person use it except yours truly. Sad truth.
- 😐 Care to share the project web link ?
  
  https://github.com/Gallardo994/imkcpp

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