Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.
Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.
And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.
Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification.
I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.