The Apple and Google stores encouraged people to sell simple little pieces of software that did things like turn on your phone's flash to use as a flashlight for 99 cents. And if someone can make a dollar for something simple like that the thinking goes, why shouldn't you "hustle" and have a "side-gig" taking your passion projects and monetizing them for a buck or two as well. Of course it took years from the introduction of such things to the ecosystem of charging people for computer software to develop, half a decade easily but it arrived and along with it came a swarm of youtube slop and articles and the like telling people about "hacks" to make money on the side, linkedin-maniacs coming out of the woodwork to tell people they were suckers if they weren't charging money for their tiny passion project, dangling unrealistic notions under clickbait titles like "I make $10,000/month just from my side projects".

And that got osmotically absorbed and repeated until it became the wisdom. Along with that the industry matured. The learn2code thing came along and diluted salaries and decreased demand, suddenly you had software devs newly minted from university who weren't getting jobs or at least not the jobs they'd been promised with the pay they wanted and so they believed these capitalist scammers when they sold them this as a way to bridge the gap between expectations and reality.

Stuff like this is why I'm not that optimistic about Linux and open source. Those flourished because there wasn't an easy, one-click way to monetize things, because in those days software engineers pulled down decent/high 6 figure salaries and on top of that were given leave by companies to invest in themselves and make passion projects instead of working at times. That plus the early internet/computing anarcho-hacker ethos led to this flourishing of open source and free stuff and now I fear it's on the decline for the future. Until socialism arrives at least. Once the old heads pass, you have younger generations who grew up with these things normalized, with in-app purchases normalized, with paid game loot-boxes and sparkle armor normalized, with app stores normalized, with patreons normalized.

Capitalism has taught people that everything should be monetized.