For me the actual message is that he doesn't have money to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and he's not going to risk going into debt.
Or you try and hop on the unicorn train and start looking for external funding - which will invariably start trying to run your business for you, in ways which you may not want.
The big money is in the latter, but not everyone wants to deal with the proto-corporate bullshit that goes with it.
Occasionally you can find niches - usually B2B, because high-worth bootstrap B2C is very hard - which bring in enough to allow solid growth without huge upfront spending on people and offices.
But they're very rare. And apart from the odd flash-in-the-pan one offs, small games are not usually one of those niches.
Hard to disagree with that. I have a few from Humble bundles and can't even use them in prototypes. They're just a grab bag of junk.
Maybe for slightly better placeholder art for a game before they are ready to invest in an art upgrade?
That's Voegl's point 3. There, he admits he probably could develop a more impressive-looking single game, but doing so would make him dependent on the freelancer responsible for the art style (risky) or on paying much more for other art to match the style (expensive).
JV isn't trying to be a runaway success, he's trying to not be a failure. I don't quite get why that's so hard for folks here to parse.
Key here is "teams". It's really hard for one person to bring all of those skills to the table.