There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with that; basically you’re requiring someone to build and grow the community for free for years until it gets “big and crucial” before paying them, by which time they may well have burned out and moved on.

I think if the software brings you value, you should return some of that value to support ongoing development - at the end of the day you’re going to benefit from the software you depend on being better developed. It’s incredible to me that people don’t support the OSS they use and then spend huge resources switching to a different vendor (e.g. PostgreSQL to MySQL) for something that could have been avoided if they were supporting the OSS from the first place. Supporting OSS is almost an insurance policy against having to rewrite/migrate.