I don’t know why you’re suddenly playing the blame game, but anyway, I do want to post the disclaimer here: I don’t hold any stake in DOT for a long time, which in retrospect has been a good financial decision. I agree that “the great firing” has been a warning sign, which I also took note of. I did work for Parity in the past, but not any more. I disagree with many of the decisions by Parity/W3F leadership, for example, their EVM strategy, and I have tried to warn them for years, but in vain. I do agree with you that many of the decisions like this probably already made Polkadot past the point of no return.
By the way, no one "rage quit"ed. It is Parity leadership who decided to fire me after I publicly disagreed with their EVM strategy (which turned out I was right – just 2 months later they pivoted to revm).
My interest in this post is purely in research of on-chain governance system.
Since you are not being nice and after many of the treasury controversies, I do think it has been established that no one should be obliged to work on Polkadot for free. If you are really interested in on-chain stats, please ask someone to submit a treasury proposal first.