The flip side of "maintainers of important should be paid fairly for their work" is that packages where this is not the case should not be allowed to become important. We need curated lists of free software packages with good governance and funding. And with no dependencies on packages that don't have it.
Today that list would likely be very small. Python is well-governed and funded, but it has a bunch of dependencies on the other list (including xz).
@freakazoid I think that under current circumstances, this is a very risky thing to propose - it is likely going to lead to "good governance" being defined by business goals, ie. "has an institutional structure" (with all of the bias towards privileged folks that that implies).
Letting this kind of situation emerge naturally by consistently funding maintainers is an approach that's much less likely to translate into unwanted second-order effects, IMO.
