Allow me to share my own recent predicament, on which I'm still deeply cogitating, and from where a lot of my own frustration flows.
I am a content creator, I write software and build compute systems to run it upon. I was RIF'd last week and, if I'm really conservative, I have a year of expenses in savings.
I very much believe in OSS exactly because it allows me, not to tap into a monetary stream, but to overall better our human community by sharing my work. IMO, this is a core and fundamental belief of OSS and it frustrates me to no end to see articles like "OSS is going to die without funding", the two concepts are diametrically opposed.
So many, yourself included, have this perverted view of the world where there's no way it could exsist without our current monetary system, no alternative that would be more efficient, more fair, more equitable. I just refuse to believe that's the case.
I do not bemoan other content creators their right to generate monetary revenue from their creations, in fact they have no choice. But that doesn't preclude my opinion that it should change.
Indeed, what do I do now? I have 1 year to create a revenue stream off of which my family and I can live, or I need to go back to an industry that has corroded my soul in ways that sometimes make me wonder if it's even worth it anymore.
The most effective path for me to generate sustained revenue is to abandon my desire to improve humanity by sharing and turn selfishly inward, all or in part, to create a Rube-Goldbergian golem of artificial scarcity around my "content". I have to build a payment system, I have to protect the code at rest and at runtime, I have to build licensing and consider segmentation, I have to market, I have to build systems around revoking access to those who lose their own monetary stream and deal with their data, etc, etc, etc.
I know what it takes to build whole companies around systems like this, I've done it from the ground up on more than one ocassion to great success (at least for those who held the keys to the artifical scarcity doors that they paid me to build in front of my own work), and if there's anything that feels like more of a waste of my life than playing technobabel whisperer to clueless middle and upper-management, is considering building something like that again, even if I'm the ultimate keyholder this time.
In a world where we do not have to fight like dogs for table scraps, all of this wasted time and effort falls away, and instead all of us content creators who skulk through it for the love of craft, can instead focus solely on the betterment of our community as a whole. We live in a world with the resources to realize a reality like this, but IMO we have all been blinded by a masterful twisting of our inbuilt self-preservation instinct by the ultimate farce in artifical scarcity: money.