I’m not saying there aren’t downsides, just that it isn’t a totally crazy strategy.

You’re being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

Of course. I’m just saying pray for the ad-free version then. If you are going to use it.

Compiled Rust is fast.

Compiling Rust is slow.

Also my understanding is that RustAnalyzer has to compile all Rust macros so it can check them properly. That’s not something that a lot of static analysis tools do for things like C++ templates

Imo that’s pretty unethical. If you don’t want ads, use an app where the maintainer has decided not to include ads or not to charge.

But don’t take something from a sole-developer (meaning in this case labor is actually getting all the fruits of their labor instead of a CEO), use one of the other options instead where the developers aren’t using it as their main source of income.