The thanks.dev approach is great IMO. Tracing your project's entire dependency tree recursively and distributing money evenly to all projects is a great way to ensure that smaller/less visible projects also get some recognition.

These projects may be small, or you may not think about them because they are 1, 2 or more dependencies away, but they are still part of the success of the project/company/product.

(Note that I'm slightly biased here, as my project (Moto) has received funding from thanks.dev in the past (thanks to Sentry)).