Meh. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still doing the right thing. If everyone benefits from their additions, it's immaterial to me what the intent of those additions were.

Isn't that the entire point of open source? I need a project, but it lacks the one feature I need. So I build the feature, contribute it back, and everyone wins. Is Google supposed to work on Amazon's needs and vice versa for them to be considered good patrons?

Do you have examples of companies that "work to just make a project better regardless of [their] end goals"? I sincerely can't think of any and don't see a problem with it either.

I skipped the part about giving $$$ because they already did that.

You are right downvoting me, I did not specify my reasoning. Basically contributing features you need in a very large project that you did not initiate yourself, leads to "featurism", more code to handle in the future, certain specific needs you accept mostly since they were contributed and saying no sometimes is hard. Instead work not interested to solve specific use cases tend to be consolidation work, or big general features work at least, where the goal is to fix something or do the right thing in some area, considering the whole public of such system, not your local needs. So the two approaches lead to different software philosophies and outcomes.