For sure there will always be those who run infrastructure for love. I believe Hive will never die. I run a witness and my cost for a long time was higher then what I made. Still today I might be only breaking even, so it's not always about the money.
But a node can only take a certain amount traffic, and blocktrades or others running this for love can only take so much. More traffic and less nodes means bad service, and users leaving, or not staying.
The amount of funds he's spent over the past 6 years on his team compared to API nodes of a shrinking userbase I think are if I were to guess a tiny fraction. Thankfully this also scales with users the same way as price.
let's hope that blocktrades lives forever...