Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s true, open source doesn’t pay (usually) and millennials and younger are struggling to buy houses and just live.
Not only does it not pay but the impact is a lot lower. Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis? The bar is sky high and for zero dollars it ain't worth it for most.
> . Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis?
No, but you can make a video player like MPlayer, a video library like ffmpeg, an image viewer like xv (not technically open source but close), a widget library like GTK1, an operating system, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of useful software which started as a one man show.