Open Source Maintenance Fee (opens in new tab)

Absolutely.

But it can still work. in a company, as an employee, you can say a tool needs to be paid and get your company to pay even if there are binaries available elsewhere.

I work for a company that sells open source extensions. It would be pretty trivial and legal to remove the license checks, but companies just pay.

Right but in supply chain terms I'm way less likely to trust the build from some random person. So if your company cares about it's supply chain it's easy to justify the expense.