Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for your comment. In reference to your edit, we are investigating a DAO to empower the community, but aren't committed to it, only investigating it to see if it is viable. In terms of funding the community, we are committed to creating a fund with non-crypto money to be able to give back.
In terms of "leaving money on the table" this is very much not that, open source is incredibly non-equitable and skews a lot to a certain way (a lot of people with who can afford to give up time to open source, not everyone but a large amount). This prevents many who have a desire to work on projects such as Gitea, but need to find a job or two to pay rent and get groceries. By establishing what we have, we are hopefully broadening the pool of people who are able to participate.