I'm partially familiar with this ideology that the author refers to, but I think it's important to separate it from actual passive income:

dividends and treasury bonds give passive earnings, you need capital. the "passive income" savants did not and do not have capital.

case in point: it should not be noteworthy that the author's friend was "$800 in the hole", it should be such a rounding error that it couldn't be any of Joan's concern. And honestly, it probably isn't and Joan put an obsessive amount of weight into an off-comment.

$800,000 in treasuries, on the other hand, now you have passive income - only ~$37,000/yr - but enough to live like a royalty in South East Asia for the next 30 years, passively, followed by getting all $800,000 back.

Class inequality aside, throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't a bad business strategy, and you really don't need to be passionate about any particular business idea to collect income.

I hope Joan's friends found something that worked from them. For me its just stay employed so I can accumulate capital for the side projects. Sometimes side projects become bigger than the employment, but my businesses are just expeditions, not forever projects.

I've never watched dropshipping influencers but I did sell some of my own electronics on eBay and noticed some opportunities in the process. Sometimes I put up identical listings as someone else's at a wildly inflated price, and people would buy from me because it seemed more serious. I would buy from the cheaper ad and put my own buyer's address in the shipping destination. Never seeing the product. Not scalable as I think its against the one of the terms, but you can do it between marketplaces too.