GPUI is quite a strange choice because there are so many forks of it, because Zed which made it is not interested in PRs that don't serve their use case of text editors, thus lots of common sense PRs for general desktop development were rejected.
It's not actually about paying money or not, I've signed up for many a patreon or what not to support open source projects I use. I fully believe in paying people for software. But for core things like this I do prefer MIT/APACHE.