Regardless of whether the contributor is paid, I think that feature requests and bug reports can be compared to feature implementations.
If the feature request includes, for example, technical architecture and product design analysis, and illustrates that it has considered various other options, it could be highly valuable.
A bug report could have involved significant debugging to identify approximate causes, affected versions, and potentially-related commits that introduced/regressed the bug.
All of the above applies to documentation and support commentary too. There is a spectrum with any contribution from 'minimal' to 'thorough', and there's not necessarily a causal link between high-value contributions and paid work.
If the feature request includes, for example, technical architecture and product design analysis, and illustrates that it has considered various other options, it could be highly valuable.
A bug report could have involved significant debugging to identify approximate causes, affected versions, and potentially-related commits that introduced/regressed the bug.
All of the above applies to documentation and support commentary too. There is a spectrum with any contribution from 'minimal' to 'thorough', and there's not necessarily a causal link between high-value contributions and paid work.