SQLite made and makes a lot of money from a lot of the people who use them. It's free for us to use, but it wasn't free for Motorola and AOL and Nokia (and later Google, Apple and Adobe) who contracted the team to build it out, add features, fix bugs on it. This wasn't FOSS funded by a few people's free time. It was a commercial business that made money by finding product market fit - the best embedded database in the world. Their scale then allowed them to find more bugs, fix them and become more reliable than anything else.

The whole story (https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/) is fascinating, but here are a couple of interesting excerpts:

> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)

> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.

> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.

If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.