How do you, or do you vet if a software will paywall features or "enshittify"?
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Unfortunately, the availability of "one time purchase" is not a guarantee anymore as more and more devs have killed existing versions sold with perpetual licences.
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What you’re saying is right about the possibility, but when you’re assessing some software for yourself, you have ton consider things in perspective.
Some protects are very complex and requires teams of developers to maintain, that’s very different than a small project that one person can maintain and curate external contributions.
So something like Chromium or Flutter isn’t the type of software that a community will self organize and maintain, they need some sort of organization behind them. This organization will probably need shone funding, ex: donations. Otherwise the projects will either fall into chaos and die or they’ll look for other ways to support themselves (ex: Qt with their commercial license and paywalled features).
Open source just defines how a project is licensing itself, but in practice everything needs resources and without these resources any project simply dies.
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(Other than things like locked down smart phone bootloaders, but that’s got nothing to do with the FOSS part of this discussion.)
See, I disagree on that. If I know something I could (help to) build will only ever be used by a few folks and can never help most people, then my motivation is significantly lowered. Well, unless I'm truly just scratching my own itch, but even then I might choose to not scratch my itch, because I'd rather quit using the platform, if possible.
And then, yeah, what the other person said about financing.
For Android, there are various small efforts in terms of forks, with the biggest being LineageOS. There are even some commercial efforts, like /e/OS. I think, Huawei also wanted to do a fork or something. No idea what happened with that.
But yeah, none of these efforts are hard forks, which can change more than superficial stuff. And it's not for a lack of desire, but because it's just such a ridiculous uphill battle to try to get anything noteworthy changed. Many times, LineageOS (and its predecessor CyanogenMod) had some cool features, which they later had to scrap, because they needed to follow what Google was doing and their features wouldn't work with that anymore. If they would've seen any chance of a hard fork working out, they probably would've tried to go that route.