For reference: Arch Linux's monthly expenses are about $2,000, most of which goes toward servers. In other words, for a project of Arch's scale, $10 million would be enough to keep it running for 500 years.
What makes you come to the conclusion that "more important" dependencies wouldn't receive funding in the future?
But both have done great work too - I use gnome-keying and KDE Connect all the time.
Calling work on these newer projects not "real" work is frankly just disrespectful, even if you don't personally use them. And they are not paying for dotfiles, they are paying the core devs of the software...