> I wonder if the reluctance to support others earning money for quality work isn’t some form of cognitive dissonance.

It's about freedom, not about price.

I will not shape my life and habits around software that can be discontinued, or suddenly changed so much that it breaks my workflows. I will not use software with proprietary formats or which has dependencies on external "cloud" services that can go away at any moment. I don't need that kind of aggravation.

Happy to pay any reasonable (or even slightly unreasonable) money for software, not an issue. Sell me each version as a stand-alone application that I can run forever without any external dependencies and I'll pay for it.

Try to lock me into a subscription model and/or make the functionality dependent on an external server, that'll be a hard No. Even if free.