This is obviously marketing disguised as satire, but in the interest of maybe providing some info that's useful to someone in the comments section I'm going to jump in here with a middle-of-the road story. I make ~$500/mo off my side project. It's nice money that I can use to explore more side projects. I'm not going to quit my day job with it. You don't have to make $5k MRR for a side project to be profitable/useful, and you can successfully scale a small idea without pouring 40hrs/wk into it.
The above TLDR is really all you need to know but if you're interested in more I wrote a longer article about how this all happened here: https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-...