You're not wrong, but is this the way we want art to be created? Should arts be primarily pursued by those who have the means to defer or lose income, or those who have the reputation and connections to nearly guarantee economic success?
Art can be made by people who wish to make it, and it doesn't have to be some "do art or make money" choice. Plenty of people who aren't filthy rich have leisure time and artistic desires.
Let me ask you something: would you value a set of ~5 games that are an imagining of VCS-era console games as envisioned to exist in an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union was the predominant exporter of culture rather than the US?
Because that's the kind of thing I come up with and would be making if I had a life situation where I didn't have to sell entirely too much of my time for food, shelter, and health care.
So I guess what I'm asking (genuinely) is, is that the kind of art you really want to see a lot more of[0], and filter through, and one way or another pay for? Or is it perhaps better the production of such things is the domain of people who do not require such support?
[0] I do, but I'm clearly biased. Count me among the people who want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less.
The number of bands, and increasingly even of huge independently developed games, that started with some guy doing something in their spare time after work is exceedingly high.
In times of patronage, even being able to obtain the instruments of your art was a substantial (though even then - not insurmountable) obstacle. Now? You can buy a saxophone for 20-30 minimum wage hours, same for something like an electric guitar + amp. The cost for other arts tend to be downward from there. In modern times programmers have it the easiest. Free IDEs, free libraries, free tutorials, free everything - you just need a computer and you instantly have access to resources that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, at one time, for free.
This is one argument for universal basic income: that it will lead to an explosive output in the arts. (I don't know enough about the debate than to comment on it further than that.)
In addition to this being a false dichotomy - art is a luxury, not a right. Even if there wasn't already a massive amount of art being created by people who do it for fun in their own spare time (that is - unpaid) - there's no reason for me to pay money for art that I don't want to consume.
(under our current system, people pay money for art that they want to consume, and so art that most people don't want to consume doesn't get made very much - but it still gets made)
