I love generative art and have been recently trying my hands at it (https://circuiter.abhijithota.me) but I'm not sure if I feel positive about it being generally tied to NFTs. I follow a lot of these amazing artists on Twitter and half of them promote their NFTs. I generally tend to ignore that part and focus on the nice patterns made by computers.
Is there no other way to make this a source of income other than NFTs?
The first example that springs to mind is Nervous Systems: https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/
It seems to me that the problem you're struggling with is that there is no market for generative art PNGs, which I'd generally agree with. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part NFTs are a gold rush in speculative investing coincidentally often coupled to things which inherently cost nothing to reproduce, like digital images, because for some reason artificial scarcity is an amazingly effective hack for humans.
Making money in art tends to boil down to making something that somebody with money wants, just like everything else. The most successful artists I know recognize it for what it is.
More practically, I bet you could build a decent patronage-style or subscriber-style distribution on top of good generative art, especially if you are releasing often. Incentives like being able to affect prompt or style details could motivate subscriptions or donating at higher tiers.
There are probably other options, like doing the design and tweaking necessary for pulling dozens of images with a consistent theme or character. There's a lot of real work that goes into that process that you could easily justify value/time on. A lot of overlap with existing design roles but more on the craft vs artiste side of things. Depends on what you want to do with it, I guess.
If you really enjoy generative art I think this shouldn't distract from that enjoyment. It's a way to create unique digital outputs that can be owned by collectors (ie its not just right-click saving PNGs), so in a generic sense it's a natural fit. You don't have to get caught up in a crypto frenzy or spend hundreds of dollars to collect NFTs from a generative artist whose works you really like. The author of this article has many wonderful projects available in a reasonable price range (for art) on both Ethereum and Tezos blockchains.
https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/writing/irl-proble...
Buyers know exactly what they're getting and artists get a huge cut of the sales (intermediaries usually take a 1-2% fee). They also get royalties on secondary market sales after the initial "print" happens.