> I think making it easier for companies to pay open source contributors is the right approach.

Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them.

> I would love to see a tool that, given a pool of money, will collect dependencies from projects in any language (extensible), find the authors (git commit history, etc.), find where they accept contributions (extensible), and pay them, based on both computed and hand crafted weights.

Looking at https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though.