Geopolitical risk is a thing too. Making less on profit now offsets the potential disruption on all exports if China were to fight a proxy war with the US.
I wouldn’t recommend it early stage since it can be a distraction and use up lots of support bandwidth. And you should be focusing on paid customers and the features that will bring value instead. But like everything in business, it depends (on the idea, vitality nature of it, etc)
Things are supposed to be hard, not easy. And there are plenty of people making a living wage that you don’t hear about. Ever hear of the riches are in the niches?
It's not a zero-sum game here. Being able to do more with less is a huge win — this enables individuals and small teams to tackle niche problems that would've otherwise been ignored. But there will always be an endless stream of universe-scale problems that require massive hordes of people to solve.
You have to strategically chase your dreams. If your dream is to paint all day, first start a business that can run itself so that it can provide you the freedom to do that.