However, I disagree with the author on global changes. I think we can do them. In fact, I think local changes can grow to global ones, or close to it.
Here's my personal plan: like many of you, I want to make money off of my FOSS projects. However, instead of going the donation route, I'm taking an entirely different tack. I am setting myself up as a professional. This includes accepting some liability for my software.
You can bet that if I'm accepting liability, I will be testing my software until it screams.
But the flip side of being professional means crafting software that is fast, and I'm going to do that too. Yes, I'll be expensive, but that software should be a massive lever as a result.
The bigger the lever, the more likely that that software will help my clients out-compete their competitors. Helping them do so is my goal because if they do, their competitors will have to start caring about performance.
And once people care about performance in one thing, it starts to disgust them to have to use slow software in other things. So it may be slow (over decades), but I'm hoping that my work will help performance go viral.