Paying the staff isn't something that happened before, so I dunno about that. I am assuming none of the donors are daft enough to keep donating compute to this new "freenode". The community seems to be moving over to irc.libera.chat so regaining their trust seems rather unlikely at this point.
If you assume that none of the donors are daft enough, why would you at the same time assume people would become staff for free? (I'd guess there will be some for both though)