Sustainability is a huge issue and bounties could help.

I think a lot of Rich Hickey's complaints were due to stress from dealing with entitled community members with little support from individuals and corporate users.

People can be relentless in their demands and project maintainers and contributers only have so much time and energy. Paying them could help somewhat in terms of motivation and resources.

This new model is interesting, but seems a bit like "magical thinking" project management born from frustration about how some open source maintainers run their projects.

It assumes that all pull requests are worth pulling, thus "time-based auto merges". It assumes that anyone who wants to should be able to contribute should be able to. While that sounds good superficially, in can lead to situations like the xz utils backdoor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor).