I would love for good contributors to be rewarded, but I'm not sure how you do that without people gaming the system and creating worse editor politics than there are now.
However, I am sure what happens if you don't pay the electricity and networking for the servers, or have a team of lawyers protecting the overall effort. Despite it's flaws, the current system is working well by my standards.
Not much of their budget is going toward hosting though -- in FY 18-19 it was ~$2.3M of their ~$91.4M expenses [1].
If we look back to 2005, Wikipedia was already one of the most popular websites on the internet, but their expenses were only $716k [2]. They were frugal back then!
I agree with the parent that the extra expenses are mostly superfluous. They have a ton of staff [3] and quite a few of their roles seem to be about promoting their brand or maximizing donations.
