These people aren't holding up the Internet. The software they built is doing that.

It's like how your house isn't its blueprint.

Writing software isn't the same as running it. Software maintenance work doesn't scale with the size of the user base.

For software you don't operate yourself, the scaling factors have nothing to do with where it runs or why or when. You're isolated from the number of installs, since you don't operate those installs, you don't keep them updated or bring them back when they go down. That burden is borne by vendors.

Sensationalist takes are great for clicks, but there is no "there" there. If this was a true economic failure it'd have been fixed long ago.

My bet is these maintainers aren't in it for the money. After all they're not currently dead of starvation, so by definition they're okay. Not billionaires, but okay.

And that's okay! Not everyone wants to be a billionaire. Some people just wanna be that person in Nebraska thanklessly keeping the planet on axis.