alt Hacker News> I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming
I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.
The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.
That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills.
That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel.
The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated.
Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.