I'd argue a lot of these indie hackers ARE probably profitable. If you take Pieter Levels as an example: He builds a shit ton of small projects, tries to monetize them, many fail, but a couple (NomadList and RemoteOk) take off and earn BIG revenue. He's a one man company, brings in almost $3m USD per year and only has 2 part time contractors to assist with community moderation (on his Slack and Discord channels) and server uptime (which he says hasn't been necessary in months (years?) and security). He profits 80-90% on his companies so that $2m + per year now? And he automates the businesses so he doesn't have to do maintenance - just build new features the community requests when he wants to: No sales team, no marketing team, no stable of devs, no customer support team. Just one man and 2 part time contractors.

Point is: you don't need a huge team to scale. You don't need to throw money at the company to grow. He's not the only one who's achieved this, but he is a great example of what's possible by one guy with mediocre dev skills and a passion to help others can do.