Not just how much faster it would grow, but how much existing projects would improve. Maintainer burnout is real, and I think that OSS would benefit a lot from long-term maintenance being encouraged by even a few dollars a year.
Even $3/year would make OSS maintenance a lot more fulfilling for me personally, because that $3 shows that I'm actually helping people.
I think the fundamental funding model seems to work well based on the number and rate of growth in small projects- philanthropy. The vast majority of small projects don’t require funding because their authors donate their time and code produced.
This seems to work really well based on how many people do it.
Perhaps more would do it if there was funding, perhaps less. We do have a large commercial software industry and they have a pretty figured out model.
Sell direction of the project. Offer roadmap milestones. Sell priority over features maybe even bug features.
Sell hats/logos/branded hosting environments.
Sell access to internal conversation. Sell invites to internal product Zoom meetings. Sell access to private jira boards/trello cards.
For all intents and purposes this module is "done". It's extremely mature and has already implemented everything it set out to do. It has 3.3k stars and 8M monthly downloads.
When I look at your list of proposals, none of them really apply to "color". The projects you have in your head are big, ambitious projects, not the smaller utility projects I describe in the article.
Is it just a thank you gift?
MIT isn’t going to fly anymore if the intention is to make money off of that.