Getting paid to work on your hobby only works if your hobby is somehow tangential to industry. For technical people, this isn’t really a big issue, because we live in a society that puts technical achievements (which result in profits) above pretty much everything else.

But for non-technical people, getting paid by a corporation to work on your hobby is mostly impossible, no matter how important the problem is. No company is going to fund things which are deemed important yet don’t make anyone money directly.