You, sir, are a trooper and I take my hat off to you.

I, along with some other denizens of these halls, participated in the Pull Request Challenge a few years back and when it so happened that the module I was assigned required Dist::Zilla my heart would sink. Such an overblown, unnecessary framework - complex and heavy in equal measure - which for a single run-and-release gives back very little. I can fully understand why folks like RJBS and perlancar would use it but it is not for me.

because I can't ever remember to do all the manual steps during a release like updating all the version numbers in each module and updating the Manifest and tagging in git, etc.

I wrote a script which does that for me. It is entirely unnecessary for anyone else to have that script or know that it exists. This means that they can collaborate with me on my modules in GitLab (or elsewhere) without having to use either my script or Dist::Zilla or anything else. It is no barrier to participation.