You thought wrong. I'm not gonna vibecode my own Photoshop, nor am I gonna be happy with the FOSS alternatives. Spending what I make in a few hours of work to have a commercial product that satisfies all my need still is a savvy business and time-saving investment.
My own company, Caution, is 100% FOSS by the way. Hackers with spare time will immediately see how to use it for free in their own homelabs, but the companies with more money than time would rather pay us than figure out how to run complex systems that require multiple people to manage securely in production. Everyone wins.
IMO an ethical business provides value in convenience without us having to take user freedoms away. Small companies acting like the big ones does not make me want to give them money personally. I -only- pay for software if it is FOSS.
My question remains. What is the appeal of paying someone for proprietary software anymore when you could pay dramatically less or nothing to get exactly the software you want because of the hard work of the FOSS community?
Selling binaries is no longer a viable business model anymore for a technical customer, or so I thought.