I keep paying for Obsidian for the same reason. It's central to the way I work and has an ecosystem of stuff-that-understands-Obsidian making it useful.

But, for example, I did replace IRCCloud with my own custom setup. Been daily driving it for ... three months now? Took me two to three evenings to get an MVP and 3 months of iterating while using it to get it Just The Way I Like It.

I was also a paying customer of Hazel[0] for two major versions, I didn't use the majority of features so I made my own that does the things from Hazel I needed plus a few extra things that nobody else is going to care about but make my life easier.

All of these are just for me, they are open source with a permissive license, but I have zero intention of making a "community" for any of them or trying to make them into commercial offerings.

They do what I want and if someone likes them as-is, they're free to use them. If they need something else - that's why we can fork repositories =)

[0] https://www.noodlesoft.com

That's funny, I felt the exact opposite and found it fun to research how to make things sync properly and architect the solution for my LLM to then build. Currently I'm using Loro for the syncing.