Yeah if your PR isn't getting the attention it needs, you probably just need to go to the discourse forum and post a request in the appropriate thread. There's one for PRs that need a review and one for PRs that have been reviewed but are pending a final check and merge by maintainers.
I suspect the reason that posting on Discourse works is because this advice is not universally followed, so the workload is reduced relative to reviewing all open PRs. In other words, it's a way to distribute limited grease to only the squeakiest wheels, not to grease everything better.
But maybe I'm wrong and simply posting one of the 165 PRs per day to Discourse would be enough to clear that particular backlog in less than a year.
While trying to get reviews, I posted on a forum a few times (I think it was this one). Got a little traction, got great advice and updated the patches. Sadly I hit the forum’s new user posting limits and was unable to get the reviews to give the final approval. So I’ve had some patches accepted and others that have been sitting there for months/years.
It has meant that after a burst of packaging, I’ve stopped submitting. I’d love to be able to get reviews even if it takes months. Any suggestions are welcome.
Try to come on Matrix; you'll be able to get much better traction there.
Some community members are also working on a merge-bot[1] with the goal of allowing package maintainers to self-service their PRs. This will allow nixpkgs to scale much better. For now, it's limited to package upgrades submitted by the ryantm-updater bot.
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-ready-for-review/3032
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-already-reviewed/2617
IMHO there could be clearer guidance regarding this but as it is it's not terribly difficult to find and it works well enough.