* why I am doing that
* plethora of burned-out maintainers and their posts
* how I am going to deal with the issues/PRs, toxic entitlement
* what's my exit strategy
The first thing before you go into open source (provided it's actually used open source) is to answer these questions honestly for yourself. Because it's massive time sink with no money and *there will never be money* (unless you go open core or your employer pays you, in that case that's just a job just like any other).
I don't view people taking the time to open issues as entitled people, but people offering their free time providing invaluable feedback.
Those issues are quite often different from what I expect, and they represent of how people are using the software.
The only mistake the author did was waiting too much monetizing, not doing open source software in the first place.
BTW good luck to scaling up to $60k / month, it will be fun
GPL scares freeloaders.
This is really what you should expect when you work to improve the commons in the same world where there are entities that are hyper-optimized to make the most short-term profit out of anything they can exploit. Of course they're not going to give anything back. It could happen to any FOSS dev. It sucks, and it's definitely human to look at all the money they're making and feel like you deserve some of it. You do deserve it! Everyone deserves to make a living. But the world is still a better place with FOSS in it. It's a shame for this to happen to someone and for them to decide that improving the commons was a mistake and instead they should have been making projects that FOSS orgs can't use and individuals and small orgs are priced out of (but is still "peanuts" for big businesses.) If you make best-in-class software that's FOSS, everyone benefits, and you can feel proud that individuals have access to the same resources as big corps because of what you've done.
I'm also tentatively in favour of the idea of scaring away big corps with GPLv3 or AGPL licensed software.