If you put it that way, I think GitHub could enable a platform feature to collect finance contributions from fans/users. Heck, even licensing costs. That makes open source programmers earn some money as well - of course along with a text field to say “thanks”.
https://github.com/sponsors
Github launched Github Sponsors in 2019. It does basically everything you described aside from the "thanks" part.
Star too, donate too, whatever you'd like to do normally too but nothing beats actually using your words