The idea of tying imagery access to contributions reminds me of a Wikimedia Foundation program called The Wikipedia Library. It offers Wikimedians institutional access to premium subscription databases such as JSTOR, Newspapers.com, and Gale Cengage. Access to most of the resources is based on the number of contributions, age of the account, and recent activity; some resources like Newspapers.com have a separate manually reviewed application process. Participants agree to cite their sources when using TWL. On a technical level, TWL endorses individual logins or provides OAuth-style integration using the databases’ existing authentication schemes.
To my knowledge, this program hasn’t resulted in any significant nonsense editing on Wikipedia, but if that ever happens, blocking the user from Wikipedia would also block the user from TWL. The main downside of this approach is that it depends on volunteers to (minimally) vet applicants to one of the sources that don’t provide automatic access.
Even so, I agree that Maxar is currently such a basic resource that putting it behind a bureaucratic process could impact the project’s growth in some regions. This is a wake-up call for some regions to work to further diversify the available imagery resources in ELI, to the extent that this is possible.