Qt devs need to eat too and they don't have a bunch of sugar daddies like Linus.

QT is a developed by a corporation. I would presume most QT core devs are employees of that organization.

That's more or less the story these days. Thiago Macieira (the maintainer for Qt Core) keeps stats on contributors.

https://www.macieira.org/blog/qt-stats/

Even so, that's EXPENSIVE! It rules out a startup I'd say.

No, it is actually quite cheap.

Usually software licenses for commercial development tools have a few more zeros, or not even that, forcing one to schedule a meeting with their sales people.

Before the FOSS movement, startups somehow managed to pay for their software.

I would have agreed prior to the re-licensing to include LGPL, but startups can still jump in and ship a dynamically linked executable. If you truly need/want static linking tho, then you are right the cost is prohibitive.

It should be peanuts if you have any revenue at all.