Comment by swatcoder

Worse (and very unfortunately), any kind of unmonitored/low-attention payment scheme that starts funneling meaningful money to countless small libraries turns those libraries into revenue streams whose ownership can be valued and sold.

And when that happens, you'll quickly start to see professional schemers and hustlers coming in to buy them, the most aggressive of whom will start surreptitiously converting some of those projects into things like data siphons or bot shells, may relicense and restructure them for further monetization or to set up targeted lawsuits, etc

It creates a whole new and dangerous incentive scheme, not unlike the one that's already corrupted the browser extension ecosystem.

To avoid that from happening, people need to be actually paying attention to what they're paying for, when they're paying for it, so that they can make sure they're still getting what they expect. Automated/algorithmic schemes like this specifically avoid that.

They're a great idea in theory, meant to address a real issue in what reward open source developers might see from popular work, but as you suggest, it opens a very wide and inviting door for trouble at scale.