Even if you had a lot of financial support, how would you go about implementing the standards and transformations described in the article? Who would adopt it?
Maybe in the context of a company this could reap benefits and become a case study. Or in a partnership between many companies there could arise such applications. But they would still be locked to a niche. That is why I think even with financial support, the problem is maturity, or lack thereof.
You could argue that once a large enough group adopted practices that proved to be effective in reducing maintenance time and complexity, that others would follow, but that stops being a matter of pure financial support and starts being a matter of adoption and convergence, pointing once again to maturity of the ecosystem.
And another aspect of maturity, standardization and sanitization is that it comes at a cost to diversity, which in turn has benefits of its own, like new ideas and technology. This is kind of the balance between exploration and exploitation we see in training neural networks. I think software is in the transitioning phase from exploration to exploitation and we are living it.
IMO if you make such a tool for something extremely popular like Python or Javascript and then start pivoting upwards from there, people will be coming to you. There are a lot of deficiencies in the everyday work of the programmer to this day.
And I don't want to only be paid an average salary for it.
But... an excellent salary (above-average, maybe even above-high) would motivate me and no, I won't try to copyright that work and mooch off it for billions until I hit 80.
As I said: incentives. Many companies expect programming to be like installing a kitchen sink yet are unwilling to pay to commoditize the activity.