I don't think it needs to be sky high. The first story on here was one of a person who just basically wrapped a bunch of transfer protocols into one commend (yes, I'm severely underplaying the time and effort involved).

But I suppose it depends on what sort or magnitude of impact you want to make on the scene.

Well in many ways its a deceitfully clever way to extract slave labor of the disenfranchised.

Its an unpopular view but most of FOSS getting to the point of adoption that its at today was largely a reaction to monopolies, barriers of entry, and bad software alternatives whose cost was price gouging.

Build an OSS software suite as a company, solicit free labor, get bought out, take it private and reap the reward of money printing.

Knowing this cycle is a reality, as opposed to just someone saying it can theoretically happen, who would ever contribute when they aren't paid?

There are plenty of competent and skilled people today who are out of work, and can't feed themselves without government assistance.

> . Can you make an editor anything like VSCode or a cache like Redis?

No, but you can make a video player like MPlayer, a video library like ffmpeg, an image viewer like xv (not technically open source but close), a widget library like GTK1, an operating system, and so on and so forth. There is a lot of useful software which started as a one man show.