I was actually there. The backlash against digital art usually came from:
people who were otherwise already elittist towards one or two painting styles and media,
art gallery regulars (they can't sell JPEGs or PSDs),
poor people as back then graphics tablets were way more expensive and alternatives to Wacom also worse (the patents for their battery-free pens haven't expired yet), thus it was cheaper to buy paint and/or markers.
Funny thing is, it's actually not that hard to get additional volunteers for an ongoing project if you're competent enough, only recent issues are YanDev messing up a lot of things (both his game and life) which might create some skepticism towards indie devs looking for such volunteering, and people not understanding how solo indie development works and fetishizing successes without truly understanding them.
I had to learn that the hard way, but with a comic/manga idea I used to have.
Long story short: I worked way too long on an idea (almost 10 years), all while my taste etc. changed. It would have been way too hard to get it working after a while without a complete revamp of the whole idea, so I ditched it completely, maybe reuse elements and character concepts in other things, including video games (yes, they're easier to make, unless your comic's artstyle is stickmen figures).
I also know a lot of them. They do suffer from main character syndrome. One of them gets extremely angry when it's not the common people that are doing the executions as he likes to imagine it.
"Why are you pointing the gun at me, I thought we just were going after the transes for transing Lily Hoshikawa and Bridgette!" (Note that a lot of these types only started to pretend to care about femboys once they were forced to prove they weren't used for just gay bamboozle jokes.)
Luck. The one that was formed by former English Nijisanji managers went immediately bankrupt, and also had dire consequences to Nijisanji itself (which also tried to step into NFTs at one point if it wasn't for the talents) as those managers were now missing from the company.
Basically if you were lucky and able to sell your NFTs for a hyperinflated price to be used in money-laundering schemes while you also profiting off of them on every transaction. If not, then your life savings were wasted on some crappy commissions.
Also it's not like the far-right never had to adjust to the current political climate. There's a quite good reason why there's now blacks and Latinos working with white supremacists.
We also could benefit from the ratchet effect, but a lot of liberal politicians are trying to win over the right. That's why some back out from trans issues unfortunately, or double down on tax cuts to the rich.
The whole "we need to win over the moderates from the other side by making compromises" is an astroturf, see the Lincoln Project. All we need is better communication, and to reveal that "the cruelty is the point" of many of the far-right's socioeconomic policies, not concerns about "the transes" (previously "the gays") might regretting their "lifestyle choices", or "giving money to drug addicts that they'll use for a lethal overdose".
I use XML as markup language, what kind of deranged person thought to turn it into a programming language? My problems with the Lua API led me down the rabbit hole of making my own VM and implementation, not looking at a markup languge, then go "what if I used this for scripting?".