I agree ... one of the greatest things I've seen in FOSS has been #HomeAssistant growing to the point that Nabu Casa can employee 25 people to work on the project (I have no idea if they're all full time or what, but I know at least a decent chunk are).
If I spin up an instance, whether it stays afloat is between me and the people on my instance, but if we want the flagship to stay up and for our dev to have the time/willingness to make improvements, he needs to get paid. Even just project managing a project of this size is an immense undertaking and just accepting PR's from others can get to be crazy.
I'd honestly prefer to not have to decide between "I want this to go to /kbin" or "Ernest is 'allowed' to buy a beer with this". I'd prefer to donate to something that ensures /Kbins needs are met for x amount of months and then the rest is split between employees of the org at whatever ratio is agreed upon. That's just my $.02 ... I really do appreciate that Ernest wants to be so careful with the fund though, I just don't want the /Kbin account to be sitting multi-thousands of dollars in the black while Ernest is struggling with basic subsistence.