When I came across lists https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github & https://github.com/thank-you-github/thank-you-github , I repeatedly saw that the license years were not updated. I thought this was important and being overlooked, thus I took it on myself to do it.

I started to create pull requests on all the open source projects that I came across. Response for my pull requests was to a great degree positive. But some maintainers were amused by the low quality of my contribution. While others accepted them but remarked that updating license years was of little significance

Here I am a bit confused and wanted to to know if updating license years is only a formality?

One of the maintainers suggested that I should write a bot for doing all this. That is a great idea to scale up my efforts but I was deterred from doing something like that after going through feedback on a very similar idea someone else implemented recently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9367501