The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.

> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.

Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"

The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?

Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?

I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.