I totally sympathize with not wanting to work on something that has become neither financially nor personally rewarding. I think the "early access" subscription model is a good, fair one, and I hope it succeeds.
> I also always believed that if you ever started a project that is valuable for companies, they would support you in return
But this just seems incredibly unrealistic. It's not remotely the norm for small open source libraries.
Omar Cornut, developer of Dear ImGui which is used by pretty much every AAA game studio, said he recently lost his biggest source of income. If he's having trouble getting stable sponsorship, I mean, good luck.