Filing a bug report properly is work and it is easier to pay.

Seems to me, describing the problem for the person you're going to pay is the exact same amount of work as filing a bug. They can't read your mind so you'll have to detail what you want fixed. Show how to repo the problem so they can prove they fixed it. Sounds like a bug report to me

Depends. No work is involved if problem is easily reproducible. Just need to describe the bug & environment to the "bounty hunter" and they will take care of the rest. Anything more than that would necessitate filing the actual issue yourself.

I have stopped writing bug reports altogether.

I believe to write good bug reports, and put serious effort in it to provide test cases, describe the environment the bug thrives in, make assumptions on what may be wrong, etc. A good bug report takes half an hour of my time, easily. Only to then be ignored for 15+ years and eventually silently closed because "we don't use that architecture anymore". Looking at you, KDE, and Atlassian (= the problem exists regardless on the monetarization format).

It's just no longer worth my time.

For a lot of fangs, unless its a bad enough publicly facing bug that it gets notable coverage, it's easier to get hired to the team to fix it yourself than it is to successfully complete all of the following:

  a) get a human to look at your externally submitted bug report unless you just get lucky with one of their team seeing your reddit post
  b) get that bug accepted by the team as a bug
  c) get the bug prioritized to the point that it isn't "bankrupted" to make the team's stats look better at the end of the quarter
  d) actually fixed