You must not have ever seen a couple of folks making min wage renting a room just to survive. America may not be quite at that disparity level but it is rapidly approaching
In the US it’s usually 2 part time jobs or 1 ft and 1 or or 1 ft and gigs. Regardless the idea isn’t that they make enough with one job and get spending money from the other. It’s basically that you need to make as much as the top 15% of earners in the US to be ok in most areas. So we work as hard as we can to survive
You could set up a docker with an exposed port for connections to the MySQL database server and run 20 databases inside it, that will come with its own risks fyi. You may have MySQL version mismatches to start with, you may have concurrent connections trying to use the same internal port, you may have a number of different situations where reads or writes take a much longer time due to other services wanting data.
And there are some Americans working similarly because they have rent to pay
You could use proton cloud storage to do 90% of the same thing you just would have to have local editors installed