Do the élite universe maintainers get paid for their work?

no they don’t get paid. maintaining a package isn’t a lot of work, you bump bounds maybe once a year. which you now mostly can automate, although you’d still have to be carefull with it. Developing features is a lot of work. Sometimes you’ve to review code, which is also a fair bit of work. On the other hand, I think it’s fun too. It’s a lot more rewarding to breath life into a project and keep it building for everyone then to just hack another nix derivation with monkey patches together just so that your own project builds.