Give it to the dev, and explain the situation. Let them know it seems too big/complex of a PR, but you’re willing to make additional changes, or break up PR to make it more palatable for merging. It’s in the dev’s hands after that.
I don’t think you should release your own fork without at least trying to work with the original project.
Make sure all your commits have detailed commit messages so that the dev can follow what you were doing (upgrading deps, refactor because xyz, etc.) Don’t just record what was changed, explain why it was changed.
anyway that’s what I would do.
Actually thinking passes values.
Speaking passes references.