For my great aunt, flower collecting was a path to peace outside the home. It was a meditative return to nature, something she could own and be alone with. It was not work. Her flower-pressing excursions were citizen science by happy coincidence.

Still, I can’t help but imagine her today, perhaps earning a paycheck as she hunted for new plant species, logging 47 hours per week among the dusty hills of Northeast California. Would it taint the purity of her hobby? Or would it enhance her life?

She's romanticizing her aunt's life. She thinks that her aunt having this hobby was so nice that monetizing turns it into something awful. The alternative was that if her aunt needed money, she would have had to stand on the floor of Sears for 8 hours a day or more. Then she would have gotten the hobby to take her mind off what she had to do to get extra money.

Monetizing leisure doesn't take it away entirely. People just find other ways of finding a way to take a break from the thing their doing all the time.

There's an underlying premise that doing something you don't like is a good thing since you can escape from it with something you do like. That probably sounds more true if it's someone else that's doing the suffering.