The artist/ technician does an activity - for which they need to be duly compensated or else they're going to have to do this for a few hours once in a while as a hobby, since they work in the Mill for sixty hours per week. This activity has some product you can capture, maybe it's a painting, a poem, a noise, an algorithm, a mathematical proof...
The audience would like to benefit from copies of that product. And we live in the 21st century so we can digitally copy many of the above things essentially for free. The audience would gladly pay even though copying itself is free, but... how much?
Unfortunately there is no relationship between how much time you spent making the Product and either how many people want copies of it, or how much they're willing to pay for them.
So you can't build something that matches these two things together. Patreon matches the reality for creators. Trudy and Doug write a comic every week †. They would like money, Patreon subscribers like me give them a few grand, and they continue to write comics. Would I like a comic about Grier, or indeed, about Oglaf himself? Too bad, here is a comic about... pirates? This model suits a lot of creators very well, and after all the idea is to support creators.
In contrast some of the print-on-demand or PDF-download RPG sites are closer to the audience's model. If I'm willing to pay $5 for a roleplaying game that's kinda like "Starship Troopers" I could buy 3:16. I don't care what else Gregor has done, or what he's working on now, but 3:16 might be interesting, it's less than $5 I can pick that up.
If you, as an artist/ technician, have bursts of interest and can't handle commitment, then that's great, Patreon isn't for you, when you make something put it on a per-product site and I hope you have some other source of income when inspiration doesn't strike.
My sister makes actual things, she's an embroiderer (and a lecturer, but we're talking about how to get paid for the art side of things). So, that's simpler, if you want a thing, she can make it, and that'll cost you money. So long as you don't waste her time specifying a thing and then not wanting it once you find out it's expensive, this is cool. Photographs of embroidery exist, but clearly a JPEG of a sixty foot wall hanging is not, in fact, a wall hanging, there's no mistaking the two.
† Oglaf: https://oglaf.com/