Is this project still alive?

[hkphantomgtr]

How many "Big Fan" ($15/month) donations are required to cover the infrastructure costs?

Infrastructure is cheap relatively speaking - only $105 per month. That's 2 bare metal servers + 2 IPv4 addresses. IPv4 addresses used to be a one time cost, but now they are at $2.50 per month (hence the weird number of $105).
 
This is why I can still cover for the costs, for now. So about 7 big fan will "break even". However this number is "before tax", so the true number is going to be around 10 to 15.

I am a C# and devops developer and has been programming for close to 30 years. I wish I could help out, but linux and C is not my expertise.
When you talk about infrastructure is it, the cost for the web servers? I think you more or less can host code and CI/DI free on github or Azure devops.
But I guess that you already have looked into that.

Yeah, have already looked into that. If only Microsoft don't own Github.

However, there are other aspects too - forums, blogs, etc. You can host these on a VPS (these services were once before), but a bare metal server is just more convenient frankly.

Any help is welcome to be honest, you can use C# in the linux world too - mono project.

Or help out in the documentation. Contribute interesting blog articles, and so on.
 

There are many OS developers that are struggling and it's hard to find a solution. I guess a one-time download fee of 20$ would be acceptable for all, but properly not enough to live on.

I would still like to keep this open sourced if possible. The whole idea of snakeoil is to make it as widely accessible to as many folks as possible. And thus allowing more people to explore/find ways on how to make digital reproduction better.

e.g. right now I did not dedicate as much time on Raspberry Pi, but look at some of the projects happening here - with better clocks and power supplies. Raspberry Pi 5 is no longer I/O bandwidth starved, this might just be the one SoC that will work...

In these few months of testing and building my Pi 5 music server, the sound of a modified Pi 5 is very surprising (esp from USB, also the digital output hats).  It surpassed my fanless mod. NUC a lot. 

Yet I can't figure out how the heat dissipation and EMI isolation can coexist in a layman setting. 

Cordially I agree with you very much that hoping there is a PCB developer can release an audio PCB with CM5, including mod clock for Pi5, NVMe, and can solve both heat dissipation and EMI isolation, too.

Probably I'll have time to update my journey in my earlier thread next week.