I think I'm starting to forget, but could someone maybe tell me what the F in FOSS stands for?
Maintaining a popular registry is very hard work, hard enough that commercial entities would rather pay than having to do it themselves. It is literally SaaS. It could absolutely be monetized for the common good - although the gamification worry is real, and the governance would be really difficult to defend from sharks. But there might be clever ways to fix those issues.
The one thing you cannot fix is the cross-planet level playing field that registries provide. Today, a small African company can pull from a registry more or less in the same way as large US corporations. If you put a toll booth up, the toll will soon be too high for people in various parts of the world.
I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything:
As I understand it, if you have the first, the second follows from it. So it's effectively the same.