What if the owners/creators/developers take none of the proceeds and its all used to further the altcoin in ways that don't involve paying salaries, etc?
That's how any ICO/crowdfunding should work, developers set milestones to reach, agreed in advance with the escrow and whoever is interested in the project. Funds should be locked and released only at those milestones so the devs won't run with the money after releasing a simple wallet clone.
I think we will start to see release of the ico money in stages becoming more common. Komodo was lucky to already have a reputable escrow on the team, so they accepted ico money directly into their 2-of-3 multisignature and can continue using the same 2-of-3 setup indefinitely if they want to.
Iconomi ico crypto is all still sitting in the escrow accounts. I'm not sure why. Maybe they don't want to officially take ownership of it until the platform is launched.
This is just a psychological way to comfort your users. Like, a popular person says that he trusts this project/dev team. This is like engaging a popular singer for advertisement. In fact, it does not give you any guarantee. But still, in any ICO, people look on the escrow agents. And if the project has no escrow, it is often marked as questionable.
This was the purpose of the escrows for projects like Lisk. The escrows didn't offer any protection to the investors other than the fact that they gave the project their stamp of approval. If an escrow puts their name on a outright scam where the people disappear, then they probably won't get any more escrow jobs after that.