"Growth" as a concept does not have to be viewed solely through the lens of Silicon Valley, venture capital firms, or capitalism in general. In the context of the network: some people here, myself included, want to see the network develop along enough to sufficiently challenge the status quo, and dethrone mainstream social networks.
For the #Fediverse to thrive, we inevitably have to bring in more people, new communities, and new ways of doing things. We need to build towards better concepts for user agency, privacy, and control. We need to also embrace the fun stuff that brought us here in the first place.
A non-zero part of Mastodon's user community has effectively modeled itself on a kind of social Puritanism that is super unfun to be around. It's gotten so bad that it's a meme at this point. Just imagine a stereotype of a stodgy librarian who tells you to CW your own lived experiences because they don't want to see it, and you're already halfway there.
There's this wild idea that any kind of commerce or barter, any kind of exhange between hands that isn't the most threadbare mutual aid, is forbidden and bad and going to make this place worse somehow. We're a network predicated on GoFundMe's and vast amounts of unpaid labor for hosting and moderation.