Sounds like the NPR model of funding. Even if you can get everything else to work, you still have a couple of weeks every year when you can’t go anywhere without having to stop and listen to Nina Totenberg lecture you 20 minutes about how important it is for everyone to pitch in as much as they can afford.
If you’re compiling something huge like Chrome, having a separate compilation stage for the build files makes sense. For a normal sized project it’s overkill.