If you look at the splits from income, moderation is handled separately. It is a fair chunk of the pie. Staffing becomes essential after a certain size. The owner salary is handled separately in the splits, but maintainence staff would need to come from the infrastructure portion of the budget. Sales staff and marketing staff have their own budget. Usage based micropayments were not considered. Tiers yes. Simply because the content creator stands to win more from the model. I am not saying that this model would work, but for sure a V4V approach will not.

Staffing costs are just a smokescreen, Gates and Bezos don't care about your server bills.

I left the micropayments team but it wouldn’t be anxiety inducing. Or at least when I say micropayments I really mean micro, like the ecash stamps from @Keychat , the idea being that you top up your wallet with some sats that are being spent on a millisat basis.