They give the example of Tailwind CSS, who sell UI blocks/kits and templates. I think that sounds like more added value than just pay me to help you use my software.

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwinds—an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwinds is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwinds head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.

Even for projects that don’t advertise commercial products, I can believe that not needing to leave the chat/IDE to do anything leads to less traffic on GitHub etc, which is where the donate buttons are for ex.

https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavyweight-hardware-hacking/

to complement the list of ressources, this was a very fun (and layman-level) read