No, fix the issue and open a PR. This is a personal project. They need contributions, not a pile of discouraging issue reports for which they'll never have enough time.
I don't have to be a doctor to know something is wrong in my body, but I would have to be a doctor to fix it. Put another way: just because you figured out something is wrong does not mean you have the ability to fix it.
As a maintainer that just makes it worse. Familiarity with the code base is typically necessary to make a good quality contribution. Issues are a sign of love, imo, because they don’t want to stop using your project, they want it to improve.
Of course there are also entitled and rude people. But we should not set the standards based on a-holes.
> not a pile of discouraging issue reports
This is such a strange way to look at software development. Discouraging?
To be honest, if I'm developing a small project I'm excited about and I'm getting an issue report from someone I'd be happy to see that someone actually cared enough to spend time on writing something (Either in the comments here, or as a quick issue on GitHub).
I would not expect someone to get familiar with my young code base and fix the issue themselves.
