One of the folks behind this effort, Filippo (https://filippo.io/) is now, as he calls it, a full time professional open source maintainer https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer/

> That means I spend most of my time on maintenance, and I offer retainers to companies that benefit from my work and from access to my planning and my expertise.

He is trying a new way of life for highly-skilled OSS maintainers. Hopefully this works out well for him.