Would single maintainers of critical open source projects be a better situation?
Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html
How much money do they make from donations? I don't know but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and hardware."
Translation: nothing at all.
If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for so many companies, including midas-level rich companies like Google, can't even pay decent salaries for core devs from donations, then open source model doesn't work in terms of funding the work even at the smallest possible levels of "pay a reasonable market rate for devs".
You either get people who just work for free or businesses built around free work by providing something in addition to free software (which is hard to pull off, as we've seen with Bun and Astral and Deno and Node).
There are examples of foundations or other similar entities paying developers, like Linux, SQLite, even Zig.
Maybe the difference is some projects rely on core contributors more because external contributions are more restricted in some way.
But sure, the entire open source model doesn't work, lol
I get the point you're making, but the way you introduced it isn't conducive to productive conversation.
The entire context of this subthread is whether or not the model that Astral was using was reasonable or not compared to an open source approach. From your initial comment, you've been touting alternatives, and the comment I responded to was giving specific examples of where you think the model worked. I don't think you've provided much evidence that there was a good alternative here, and when you're taking an opinionated stance, a productive conversation will sometimes involve people pointing out flaws they perceive in your arguments.