It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
tbh there will always be demand for free work, these small libraries that people don’t support seem like free code to me that corporations can write themselves relatively easily.
There are plenty of options and case studies for how to do this, in particular tidelift (which was started by a legit open source contributor) is one option, people manage to raise money using open collective and offer incentive through patreon (vue.js is a good example).