My general cynicism of people as a whole drives my opinion, I suppose. While it can be successful sometimes as you point out, I don’t think enough people would contibute for a donation based model to work in most cases. And people already have subscription fatigue just from online streaming services.
But you know what would be awesome? If I was wrong. Especially about the donation based model. Enough people opting to donate for high quality content that it becomes a viable default? I want that kind of web.