Effectively, they are putting the project above themselves.

No. They are working on something according to their own terms and their own value scales. They are giving a clear indication of what they are willing to do for the miser amount of money they are getting, and are telling quite clearly what they do not value highly enough to justify spending their time on it.

They would be sacrificing themselves only if they bent over and worked on something they already said they don't want just because other people see value in the work they already done and want them to keep pushing out the missing functionality.

This is going to sound shitty: just as the expectation is set that no one should make demands of work done for free, so too is the expectation that development work technically isn’t owed a single penny. Any donor can stop giving, for any reason, at any time.

It sounds shitty because it is shitty. The donation-based model is insufficient and unsustainable. What you are describing is the main reason that I'd rather shut down any of the communick instances over turning to "donation-based" access. At the same time, the reason that I have managed to keep things running (even if not profitable) is that by refusing to play this game I don't put myself in an unsustainable situation.

The surprising thing is to see how even people who have been involved in the space for so long continue to advocate for the donation-based model. Perhaps it would help everyone if we accepted reality and started telling people that it is not okay to push people to work for free? That donations are only a way to show support for what people are doing and do not entitled them to make demands of any kind? Thay if you want something done according to your exact preference and expectations you need to enter a proper contract where both parties agree to the terms?

This is why I was a bit frustrated with your last blog post. You acknowledge that there is a problem with FOSS development, but instead of trying to elaborate on a alternative model, it went down the route of victim-blaming the FOSS developers who you think should swallow the opportunity cost and keeping cranking out code. This is not healthy at all.