[Traster]

You're completely right that the paypal "Donate" button was a complete dead end. I suspect though, that Patreon has actually just changed the audience expectations around how they're going to support creators, and if you went to the trouble of throwing up a simple patreon style page on your own using one of those cheap template websites, that's probably much closer to the success of Patreon than the paypal button. I'm not actually saying you should do that - obviously for most small creators a small percentage of a small amount is totally reasonable. But Patreon have a real problem if anyone successful naturally grows out of their platform.