alt Hacker NewsWeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of Cloudflare/Oracle OCI.
The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.
Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.
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For the RuneScape wiki at least, they seem to have a paid agreement with jagex to maintain the wiki. Which makes a lot of sense, the game devs probably want to have a good wiki for their own game (especially for a game like RuneScape). Not sure if that's the case for the other wikis they host, though.
WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world. I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.
You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that. The problem is that there's rarely the will because it's a hobby endeavor for tiny communities, and until you last as long as the Fandom alternative would last, it wasn't even necessarily the right thing to do.
You can't just migrate and call it a day. You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest in the game and fiddling with MediaWiki.