Good point. I wanna point out that plex is not foss. Its closed source software which makes those moves even more idiotic because they could have paywalled new servers and accounts instead or weaned people off from their servers if they use local only, etc.

But yes, one only needs to look at foss projects like lemmy, pixelfed, kde, gnome to see how it is done. This absolutely means you have to have more people than just yourself or you will definitely burn out.

Tldr: some use gov funding, kickstarter, additional features, turnkey hosting, explain and ask for donations, etc.