There is also the expectation these days that when your project grows big enough, the unicorns are supposed to step in with funding. Considering MSFT is evaluating and using Rust now, paying a couple maintainers would hardly unreasonable for them, the community dropped the ball here. Mozilla and the Rust community need to step up their fund-raising game, losing product managers left and right is simply terrible for the ecosystem. Just a fortnight ago we lost the lead developer of one of the fastest web frameworks in existence over ideological conflicts. For good or for bad, libraries don't code themselves, every effort needs to be celebrated and applauded.