Quality open source work does not materialize out of existence for free. If you don't want to drive your project through a corporate sponsor that will want to steer it, this is the only way.

And as you can see in the post, this is not just code, it's also people being hired to do docs, planning, conferences, community, design work, web dev, things that are rarely done well in open source because they are hard and people can get paid for them elsewhere.