I don't really care about the free part though. If I could pay for Jellyfin and it would be better, I would happily do it. I pay for Infuse so I have something usable on Apple TV even though Jellyfin itself is free. I don't care if other people don't pay for it.
I would rather pool various other people's money who have the same perspective as me to allow one of the Jellyfin contributors to prioritize and perform changes in the project that I and others value, which raises the boat for all. There's no world in which I am going to learn how to contribute to Jellyfin to fix something fundamental about the Jellyfin architecture, for example. It would take years to even get buy-in from the core contributors to have that access. Maybe I could spend a few months and clean up minor UI things or something, but what's the good of that?
I see this take a lot, where a project being free / OSS means that no one should have an opinion on it or that if they don't like something, they should fix it themselves. That's literally what money is for, so I can transfer wealth for some benefit to someone who is better at something than I am, so I can spend my time doing things I'm good at. Nothing about that prevents Jellyfin from remaining FOSS but at the same time, making improvements and receiving and prioritizing community feedback.