I also only recently learned how much money is flowing in the WordPress "community". You ran into all these commercial plugins and consulting services, because

I also only recently learned how much money is flowing in the WordPress "community". You ran into all these commercial plugins and consulting services, because that's what most of the WordPress community is. People having their own company, hosting or maintaining sites for others and on the side developing commercial plugins. To me this begs the question, whether making everything open source and available for free in your own free time or while working at some big corp as is the standard in the JavaScript world, is really the better alternative? At least the WordPress community has found a way to sustain themselves, provide services to tens of thousands of small to big businesses, while the JavaScript community seems to be mostly dependent on big tech to keep the lights on for most services.