That's also work. You don't get to ask the hobby programmer to do your work of vetting serious/maintained projects for you. As the professional with a job, you have to do that. If some rando on GitHub writes in their readme that it's maintained, but lies. You're the idiot for believing him. He's probably 12 years old, and you're supposedly a professional.
> No software is ever developed this way.
That's just inaccurate. In my day job we pay for at least 3-4 3rd party libraries that we either have support contracts on or that were developed for us along with a support contract. Besides those there's also the myriad of software products, databases, editors, Prometheus, grafana, that we pay for.
Software people really underestimate how much business guys are willing to pay for having somebody to call. It's not "infinitely scalable" in the way VC's love, but it's definitely a huge business opportunity.