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There's two models that solve this.

a) sell support contracts

b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that

c) Open core model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

which seems to be by far the most common

No, they don’t.

Selling support contracts is actually hard.

GPL/AGPL preclude widespread adoption (these days) — the grandparent explicitly mentioned “permissive” licenses.

All businesses are hard, but I don't think selling support is especially hard for one. The above two are how x264 development was funded, but it's also how Klara works for BSD and Igalia for web browsers.

It’s the difference between a project and a business.

They made an open project and let the community contribute to it and adopt it.

They wished it was a business, not a project. A business has support, sales, and higher expectations than the serve-yourself open source projects

If this were true no nonfree software would ever make money