I see what you mean and understand you. It’s very idealistic and I appreciate the thought of it, but it just won’t apply to a modern world full of varied people in the way you wish. The reality of it is that most people simply are not interested in participating and it’s not in the best interests of any project to expect to change that. Contributions from someone who shares no passion or interest will be less qualitative at best. That’s not even to mention that you’re likely missing the forest for the trees, as most open source software is built upon hundreds of other projects. You cannot reasonably expect participation on that scale. You can encourage, desire, or structure an income stream to support it; but you cannot expect it as it’s just not rational.
If you have an old desktop to repurpose, jellyfin is best ran on one of those with an Intel a380 gpu as long as the motherboard supports resizable bar. Cpu-wise jellyfin doesn’t really do anything intensive, and intel’s gpus all come with the same 2x video pipelines so upgrading to a 770 wouldn’t add any performance. If you’re buying new, my recommendation would be to get one of those intel white label laptops xpg made for a while. They can be had around $300-500 and come with a intel arc gpu you can use for encoding, resizable bar, decent ram, and a decent cpu. Great little jellyfin boxes.