It does work for the right sorts of projects [0]

> whether an OSS project lends itself to monetization is a really interesting and subtle question. rule of thumb, be at least two of these: big, boring (roughly correlates with "infrastructural" as @patio11 puts it), and lacking obvious substitutes

Many projects with high star counts fall into only one of those categories

[0]: https://twitter.com/colinhacks/status/1422222156340072456