Does something need to?

> the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net

Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.

Buddha was as you say a prince, renouncing wealth is a move only available to someone who has wealth, and he could have gone back.

Epicurus owned a garden and the leisure to sit in it.

Diogenes I can kind of buy about but he still lived off a slave-owning city that had surplus to spare.

Also none of them had kids or other dependents to take care of.

We have more food surplus now than ever before. But we also have more distractions than ever before.

Buddha: he survived without a safety net, that's my point.

Having kids and dependents makes it harder, but not impossible. You may have to leave them. Again, OP never said it would be easy.

I run a site which gets around 60k real MAUs per month and have had to deal with this in some shape or form. I haven't given it as much attention as you have though, because it started to feel like whack-a-mole like you describe and other things took priority. I've concluded that the most viable long term solution is to move most pages behind a login wall. And only keep a page public if I see the ROI from the page being scraped by AI bots, Google, etc... for you this could be only the really high-profile donor pages, but not the long tail pages. Once pages are behind a login wall, we can track anomalous activity at a behavioral / account level and automatically suspend those accounts. For example, an account visiting every donor page will be easy to detect.

Made me chuckle. I say have winnable goals