There have been very decent alternatives, but they never took off.

One such was Flattr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

Flattr was a Swedish-based microdonation subscription service, where subscribers opted in to pay a monthly patronage to help fund their favourite websites and creators. It shut down in November 2023.[1]

Flattr subscribers installed an open-source browser extension that records which websites they frequent and shares this data with Flattr.[2] Flattr processes this user data and pays out shares of the user's subscription to each registered Flattr creator based on which websites the user consumed.[3] Flattr filtered websites by domains with a default allowlist of participating domains, but individual users could override and contribute to any website they want or withhold contributions from any website.[4]

I used it for a while, but not many websites and creators used it, so most of my money was going towards a select few.