Yea I didn't phrase that correctly. I tried to address it elsewhere but it just seems odd that these tiny projects are making so much noise over money while these larger, more integral ones have been going on for decades, providing much more value without turning your install process into a gofundme campaign.
FWIW, I agree. I don't remember the name of the NPM module from the article I just read, and I sure wouldn't have paid them any money if I had been alerted as part of their experiment.
I only donate to obscure Debian derivatives though, so...
You could donate to all of those projects, but there's no moral imperative to visit them all in order of importance, just because they all played a part.
A permissive license is permission to behave otherwise, and just like Open Source contributions are made voluntarily, your support in kind should be on a voluntary basis too.