Machine readable definitions are nice, but I think the real problem is not that people/companies can't figure how to send money to the developer(s) of some piece of FOSS software. Rather, the problem seems to be that 1. many people and companies would prefer not to pay at all and 2. the maintainers are surely not the only ones contributing; how to pay all the rest?

I wonder how we could actually "reach" the roots of FOSS with funding. For example, the whole Faker.js thing copied their data definitions from the similarly named Ruby project, which copied them from the even earlier PHP project. How much funding do those earlier projects deserve? Which percentage do any of the ~257 contributors to Faker.js deserve? Somehow Marak does not strike me as an overly generous person.

Personally, I treat any contributions I make to FOSS more as a hobby. There are some PRs I've made in the past that fix a decent chunk of technical debt or introduce fancy new algorithms to speed up parts of the software. Those PRs were submitted without an invoice, even though I do similar work as a freelancer. If I knew the maintainers were getting significant amounts of money for their work, it would definitely not be the same feeling contributing significant chunks of work for free.