Conversely, as an organization, it makes sense to never accept changes without a CLA.

This is why there should be an easier way to auto-sign CLAs or better yet, programmatically declare that all my contributions are CC0/public-domain so nobody has to contact me to find out that my code doesn't come with strings attached

The one time I was asked about signing a CLA, it wanted to me guarantee patent indemnification as well forever. Not only is this inadvisable, there was no way the legal counsel of my employer would permit that.

People constantly make this comparison, but it's stupid, the Linux kernel's DCO is just a CLA by a slightly different name and slightly different signatory procedure; giving it a slightly different acronym doesn't make it something else. The very fact it's mandatory makes the exact opposite case, that the world's most popular free software project sees it as important. Putting a Signed-off-by is literally a legal statement that you have the right to yield the given changes to the project, and that you affirm the right for them to be redistributed. This is exactly what most CLAs do; most don't assign or transfer ownership or copyright in any way because it isn't necessary.

Ironically, despite all the (unequivocally 100% wrong) yammering about this topic on places like this forum, many of the bigger "evil" companies like Meta and Google don't require transfer of copyright to contribute to their FOSS projects, while places like the FSF do require it so they can relicense under potential future FSF licenses e.g. a practically stronger version of the GPL 3's "or later versions" clause. And there are even more agreements like the FSFe's FSA that can stipulate exactly a fixed set of licenses that might be used in the future, as a sort of middleground.

The ASF uses CLAs so I beg to disagree.

Unless one is fine with relicensing.