Yes, money can be made without combat. Thing about exploration is you do not need to fight there. Just go there with a Dram (and maybe a few Shepherds and Mudskipper if you need crew and cargo too), get your money, and come back for another. If you get caught, reload game and try again. (If it is Domain ships, just leave and avoid combat.) Or just get commission and wait a year for some free money that way. The only activities that require fighting are bounties and colony defense. So, in a way, bounties are combat for practical purposes (because there is no need to fight otherwise), until your income is so high that you do not care, but that occurs around endgame.
Still, it is no fun when most bounties scale faster than you can, and that used to not be the case several versions ago. I would not mind few bounties that are too strong, but it is a problem when most if not all of the easy bounties disappear and only the overpowered bounties are left. Also, having no weak bounties (when you are still in the early game with frigates and destroyers) is like, what happened to all of the wimps?
As for bases, until you find it, there is no telling if the base is a single section low-tech or midline that is easy to kill, a high-tech base the refuses to die thanks to fortress shield, an orbital station (or worse, battlestation) with all segments and no blind spots, or any station next to a black hole where all ships lose peak performance very quickly, and you must have either Solar Shielding or Hardened Subsystems to have barely enough time to kill it. (Thankfully, Alex should fix the black hole base problem.) Then there are the fleets that might camp at the base and just will not leave fast enough (meaning you fight those too with the base).