I think you underestimate the level of effort required to develop and maintain a quality app. Every year around this time my life gets real hectic. I would not do it for no money. I think the app store gold rush days are just about over. A couple people on a wing and a prayer who got in very early on have gone on to do pretty well. But an indie dev with no distribution is going to find a pretty cold welcome in the app store. And a pro is going to figure out a way to make the books balance, either via exploiting engagement however they need to, or freemium, or cutting effort expended.
I think you both overestimate the level of effort required to maintain an app that "just works" (kinda, for the kind of people who'd take a mostly-working free app over the paid one with lots of polish and working 99.999% of the time) and underestimate the "like me" effect. I've developed software for 15 years, including mobile apps. I know what's involved in creating and maintaining a high-quality, professional application. I also know that our society doesn't value that as much as a software developer might.
In particular, our culture, especially those in the "younger" (borderline Gen-X/millennial and younger) cohorts have effectively grown up in a world where "the self" has been commoditized in the form of "karma", "likes", and so forth in social media.
There are a lot of developers for whom the "skinner box" treat is another tenth of a star on the ratings bar or the next big "times downloaded" milestone. They're just as happy to "earn" 50,000 downloads in a few days and a 4-star rating as any amount of money for an app.
I agree to a large degree. I just think that the thrill of strangers' adulation is going to wear off after a while, what was new and novel becomes a grind, and people start to ask why, if you're so smart, you're not rich? And so the guy in his garage either gives up and goes back to his day job, sells out, or tries to monetize. You can do mobile apps for the love of the game in your early twenties, but I think there's a definite expiration date on that kind of thing. Maybe the next generation of young suckers will take the place of the old generation, but I think it's more likely that in a few years some other thing will be red hot and the gold rush will have moved on. (And mobile is very much a gold rush mentality, which is, at the root of it, centered around striking it rich.)
