I dont blame em for going with that decision. Maintainer/devs are also wearing customer service/ PR and bookeeping hat on top of the things they build. Things cost money, especially time, call it greedy or not but people have to pay housing and food. Its tough and similar to a lot of industries, nobody cares until something goes wrong. All the best to this person 👍
It does also have third party repos such as sbopkg. This does a bunch of the movement for you when installing packages though you still need to manually install dependencies, BUT If you also add sboui which is a front end package resolution for dependencies then the process is much faster. I like the stability of Slackware, and also because its helps me get better for when I try the BSD since its very much like them as well.