So in other words, there's a 99.9% chance you, the aspiring FOSS dev, are screwed. Even a big project like C:DDA only got money to pay for like 3 months and that's it. And this is the exception, not the norm. And by "you", I mean all of us, really.
This world just hates FOSS. People keep flocking to the loudest snake oil salespeople that promise them the world while snatching away their freedom in the background. And people LOVE it. At the same time, they laugh at FOSS people as inferiors. We are the scum of the IT world. Especially if we focus on actual freedom, call out the corporate lies, that's a very fast way to get hated. Of course, this hate is fueled by the big proprietary megacorps, but the normies don't realize that. They just love their snake oil so much.
I don't care how much open source fans like to claim that open source pays. The reality is that for most people, it does NOT pay. It is so much easier to get money for subjugating yourselves to the evils of the proprietary world. We live in a system that rewards selfishness and punishes selflessness.