I think it depends on what you mean by "cheap foreign engineers." I am born and raised Canadian. I make a decent chunk less than my American counterparts, even when working for the same company. Not because they are necessarily better suited for the job, but literally because of the country I live in. The same is true for engineers all over the world.
So yes, companies absolutely can get cheap(er) labour and have the same, or at least similar, quality.
That is just saying that they will be giving some donations to the project. I have zero insight into W4 or the Godot Foundation, but they may have already donated. They don't claim to be the sole financial contributor to the project.
> I do wonder if maybe streaming large data chunks over Erlang distribution might be a problem and a secondary data channel (e.g. over udp or sctp) might be worth playing with.
You may want to take a look at the partisan[0] library written in Erlang. It is basically that, a reimagination of distributed Erlang, except that it can be multiplexed over multiple connections.
It really isn't this simple, no. I remember a number of years ago someone tried to do this. Pardon the language, but the "product" was called "Fuck adblock" I believe. It was a piece of JS that you could include on your site that, if I remember correctly, tried to see if certain JS objects existed. If they did exist, you could disable aspects (or the whole thing) of your site. Very soon after, someone released "Fuck fuck adblock" that essentially disabled this piece of JS.
It was a cat and mouse game for a while, but ultimately, if you want to detect if someone is using adblock, you need to do it in JS. And then the ad blockers will just add that piece of JS to their block lists.
So yes, companies absolutely can get cheap(er) labour and have the same, or at least similar, quality.