You’d be surprised to hear that wikipedia’s main income is from their major benefactors like amazon, google, and other organizations. Donations from individual people make up a small portion of their income.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/donors/#section-2

Another example would be lichess.org , which manages to compete with chess.com (a comercial site) and even pays the main developer a salary. All based purely through donations.

I think it can definitely work even in the long run.