I don't think the person in the dm would have liked this answer.
"if you build a career in developing plumbing and glue code, in the future you could have a successful Kickstarter where nostalgic developers buy your curiosities"
I think you mean nostalgic gamers, not developers. They're not getting that much money just from other developers.
But why not? There are quite a few businesses that basically run off of Kickstarter. Like 30% of the board game industry nowadays fund most or all of their prints runs off Kickstarter, including some of the largest board game publishers, like CMON, Awaken Realms, AEG, Eagle-Gryphon, Garphill, Greater Than Games, Renegade, Portal and Queen Games (lots more publishers than this too).
A career in developing plumbing and glue code has already been significantly in jeopardy from the consolidation at plumbing and glue code factories in the video game industry. There's still a number of large companies doing bespoke game engines but not like it used to be. Nevertheless, there is still work in understanding the market leader engines and providing more of a mechanics job.
Those Kickstarter opportunities are something you do once you already have a viable income in something else because in the end they don't pay particularly well I feel. It has to be a labor of love.
