What does it alleviate? How does it alleviate it?

It seems like your reply not really with reference to what I said. What does free software do with regard to "...for people to work on it a lot, they need to be paid."?

Your point was that inevitably a company's interests will outweigh any other motivation. When this happens, and a platform starts going to shit, FOSS would enable users to either easily migrate to a new platform, or just fork the platform itself into something new.

(Not that type of free)

The problem is not just that a company's interests outweigh any other motivation -- it's that those interests are what lead to resources being allocated in the first place. FOSS doesn't address the problem because people don't get paid by FOSS.