ObsidianMD

I would like to write an Operation Manual for municipality’s water system. There will be embedded screenshots and some links to other sections of the document.

Ideally we could “publish” to offline html. The customer would also like a printed manual.

This is not personal use. This is commercial use.

If my employer was telling everyone to use Obsidian that would be a different story

In that case your employer would need to provide you with a license.

Not to mention, the core obsidian application is lackluster at best; it’s the plugins that really make it stand out.

If Obsidian is lackluster, then why even complain about its licensing model. Just move on to another programm.

How much of the money goes to plugin creators?

I don't know and I don't think it matters. Plugin creators frequently provide donation methods on their sites. I also don't believe that Obsidian is as profitable as you might think. I don't think the income generated through licensing covers what the Dev team actually puts in in terms of work, although I don't have any figures on that.

This is also a poor attempt at moving the goal post. You just realized that you are not behaving ethically... and instead of sucking up to it and either paying 50$/year for a commercial license or moving on to another product (which most definitely has a licensing model as well) you are hating on an indie software dev team. Go and play with OneNote.