I understand that part. But I could read 'monetized' as a project the received a donation.
If you allow yourself to make money from the code, you're accepting liability for it. If you choose not to accept money in exchange for it, you don't have to accept liability.
This seems fair to me - the law doesn't let you both "sell" it (however low the minimum price is) and refuse to give any rights to the people who gave you money.
In the past we could choose to work for peanuts with low risk. Now we can't. We have to work for nothing or work for a lot to have a chance of covering compliance.
And even then, you have to be unlucky enough to actually get caught and investigated by market surveillance authorities. I think you're going to be more likely to get caught up in income/donation/gift tax bracket fraud investigation than to ever feel the impact of the CRA as a hobby open source dev.
If you’re a FOSS dev in the EU who works on something controversial, and you accept donations, it would be better to outsource the project “ownership” to someone unnamed or outside of EU jurisdiction.
Now, from a US perspective rather than an EU one, even being investigated in the US carries a huge risk. It is especially bad in the case that someone wants to prove a point against you. You could suddenly find yourself having to spend huge amounts of money defending yourself because someone wants to make a name for themselves, or you pissed a large political donor off.
"There is no legal risk for individual contributors simply sharing code online or in publications, even when they receive payment for writing an article, as long as the software itself is not monetized or organized."
So, maybe EU developers would have to learn the safe wording through which to solicit and accept donations, but at the very least, donations supporting their software activities in general (and not tied to a specific software program) will likely not increase CRA requirements - and maybe even voluntary donations to support development of a specific software program but which are not in any way mandatory.
Perhaps the future is shadowy projects led by an anonymous figure who merely merges pull requests, while named devs contribute work and receive support from their fans/supporters.