I've worked for free for companies and people that HAD the exposure and promised exposure or 'feel good feels for being a part of something' Heck, I even did free art for charity work. All of this under the false assumption of "You have to start out working for free to get your foot in the door" "every little bit of exposure helps" Which no... it does not unfortunately, else everyone in these forums both writer and artists would be making it big already. Not all exposure is equal, some is utterly worthless.
Working for a 'big name' people got me no exposure, and they used my art for years afterwards (only giving me credit the first year if anything,which amounted to nothing) Most of the people that worked there didn't even know my name or even realize what art belong to me or what projects they had assigned me to work on. I was just "oh you're one of the artists" if they saw my staff shirt which read 'staff artist' (ALSO, they could afford to print out staff shirts but NOT afford to pay the artists that designed and drew the imagery on them)
There were also a surprising amount of 'printing errors' where my name was just... not printed out in the comics or magazines for SOME REASON.
After 4 years of providing art for free and fast as hell, as usually I had a deadline of a week and sometimes 2 days, for a growing organization that was NO LONGER none profit (they were making money, they were no longer considered a non-profit company like when they started), me and another artist at one of the meetings, asked if they could tone down the drawing requests (they were asking for hundreds of pieces from us) because they're technically asking for over 5000$ in commissions for one weekend event, and some artists need to do commissions alongside all these ones they want that pay their bills, we needed to make time for both and couldn't do that much for free. We were both replaced with new artists within weeks. (we didn't even ask to be paid, just said we can't do so much because we have to fit in time to do other work that pays us because we have bills to pay)
If well established companies and conventions can't gain you a following despite having been around for 10+ years and known throughout this side of the country, a writer with 20 followers who are mostly friends and family are not going to give you exposure that will help you in the long run.
I urge everyone to 'miss out' on '^these' wonderful pay in exposure bucks opportunities. (which is of course not all of them, but a large amount of them do turn out like this)
Because yeah, there are exceptions, sometimes you'll find someone and end up making a project together, or you'll run into someone and the ideas just click. It happens and it works out, and those experiences usually happen with friends or like minded people in a community, but these positive collaborations are not usually going to be found in the 'looking for artist -no pay-' posts.
The gigs that I ACTUALLY got popularity and exposure for, were paid gigs.
That said, sure writers don't have money, but artists don't have money either, the market of comics is both over-saturated and undervalued, and it got this way because of narrative that you need to start out working for free cause no one will pay you for your art if you're a no one, from artists undervaluing their craft and not charging enough, and the sad fact that people care so little about art that we're easily replaceable for the next fresh face willing to do work for free. The 'don't work for exposure' narrative is not set up as a "fk you" to writers. It's one meant for artists to try and protect one another from being taken advantage of in their carrier as it's such a huge problem in every single field of art. Writers just run into it on the writers end. (and this is ignoring mass amount of 'writers' that DO NOT have a good set up or contract for their artist, we're pretending that every request is good and valid, which in my experience is actually very rare)