I was tempted to disagree, but the Patreon subscription paywalls is a very good point. Are we doing less free work for the public good (or at least accessible to the public), or is it a prevalent niche that's very visible, without influence on those that volunteer work like before?

The thought I had before that was that maybe the creative output changed. People build in Minecraft and VRChat, in hosted platforms. This may be different to before, where mods were separate things and communities.

I still see a lot of voluntary open work. But I'm not confident in assessing it's prevalence or shift.