Yes. It's basically impossible to start with a new idea as a gifted new coder in open source and survive. I speak as somebody who's making close to $700 a month (and this is exceptionally high!) on Patreon for coding: literally the only reason I can say even that, is because I ran a small business for ten years selling closed source software directly, and establishing my reputation and skills.

So in order to not really be able to sustainably survive, took a decade of successful work in the commercial sphere. I fully intend to go open source with my life work, hardcore, but I am also fully aware that doing so rules out my own survival as an economic actor, and I'm trying to sort of develop an existence as a 'youtube/media personality' that'll support a poverty-level Patreon in a consistent way. That mechanism ought to keep me from actually starving or being homeless, but it's about 'being seen making or explaining stuff', not the code, no matter how brilliant or important the code is.

FOSS is NOT about making even the poorest living, and never will be. FOSS is about the vocabulary of thought. Broadening the vocabulary of thought is crucially important to the world, and completely orthoganal to being an economic actor. To devote yourself to it means starving or burning through your resources until you're starving, and being left with nothing.

This is important to understand, because it's solvable. If creativity and FOSS is anti-money but hugely beneficial to the world, we simply need to unlink survival from money, and conclude that whatever money represents, it's not merit.