Yes, I completely agree that HN has a massive cognitive dissonance about this. They're so used to venture capitalists and FAANG companies lighting billions of dollars on fire to subsidize money-losing but moat-building projects that they have completely unrealistic expectations about what is reasonable for the other 99.99% of the universe (without magic money fountains propping them up) to do sustainably.

But the reality is that because of this, browsers are commoditized, and the average user will never pay for a browser if they can get Chrome or Safari for free. That's probably true of the average HN user, too, for that matter.