Let me share how it looks from my end.
More than a year ago, Meteor partnered with a couple of companies (including Vazco) and people (including @zodern; AFAIK, he had some deal before). It was publicly announced in New faces collaborating on Meteor.js. @piotrpospiech and I are employed at Vazco, and we were given a certain hourly budget and worked on a multitude of topics as a part of our jobs (i.e., paid). If you want to know what we did exactly, you can check the PRs (here’s meteor/meteor, but there were more). I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say anything, but I think I can say that this partnership with Vazco has ended.
Besides that, Vazco has an Open Source Group that I’ve been leading for years, and while it’s been focused on uniforms or universe:i18n, we can freely distribute our hourly budget also on Meteor (again, as a part of our jobs, so paid). That’s where https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/8893 came from, for example.
I’m working on some projects in my free time. In the past, it was the MiniMongoExplorer (which I’m still using because I’m used to it); now it’s changestream-to-redis. There are also other non-Meteor things, e.g., ranges-set. And while I do them to make my work easier (MiniMongoExplorer), by open-sourcing part of my work (ranges-set), or by building alternatives I’m using on projects (changestream-to-redis). I’m more than fine with doing that “for free”, although I won’t fix every single issue this way (especially if it doesn’t affect me or my work).
Not entirely for free because some people sponsor me on GitHub. I’m getting paid really well, and I don’t need this money to survive. I treat it more like a token of appreciation and kind of a “thank you” – that’s it. To be perfectly transparent, I got 3332.78 PLN (777.83 USD at the time of writing) in total since November 2019 and I’m grateful for every single cent. Also for every star on GitHub, heart here on forum, “You have a typo in your latest blog post!” DM, and whatnot.
Having said all of it, I don’t think it’s unusual among the ecosystem – people come and go, and most open source work is not paid or is done by some company directly benefitting from it. I’m not sure if I like it or not, but I got used to it.
The only thing I’m truly sad for is this year’s Meteor Impact. I contacted @storyteller about it, and he’s simply too busy to organize it. I’m surprised that Meteor Software didn’t do anything about it, but it is what it is. I assume it’s partly because of how much effort goes into Meteor 3.0, but still.
While I am working on making Blaze async alone, I wanted to give a huge shoutout to @DanielDornhardt (I hope it’s @DanielDornhardt’s forum profile!), as he’s putting a lot of effort into nagging me to work on that and make it even better testing every single piece of it and providing valuable feedback. Really, if not for his questions, we wouldn’t have a half of it.
I guess I’m not critical 
(All good, I’m just being picky.)