These are the folks that brought you the word 'hackathon', and OpenSSH. (Ever use ssh? Thank OpenBSD.)
These are the folks that actually bother to read not just a PR, but actual full codebases, just to make sure their pointers don't dangle.
It's been years since the DevOps space was first told to prefer 'livestock' -- disposable, nearly-identical instances -- to pets -- long-lived customized instances and servers -- but as every farmer knows, if you have lots of sheep, the job is a lot easier if you have a sheepdog. Not quite a pet, but not cattle, either.
OpenBSD is my sheepdog. It keeps my git repos, it runs my wireguard VPN, and it, above all the other systems I touch, is trusted.
But trust is ultimately about people, not about systems. Systems get their trusthworthiness from their creators, the way the moon gets light from the sun.
And in trustworthiness, the OpenBSD community has a breathtaking superpower: They can say no. They are good at saying no. Do you know how hard that is -- to have someone ask for a feature, and just tell them off? That's the hardest thing any manager ever has to do, and these guys are good at it. Rare, in FOSS space.
These are the folks that are so good at saying 'no' that they ship with a literal actual bespoke copy of 'vi', that does exactly what it is supposed to, does not take packages, and also does not have a package manager pulling in raw github HEADs. (I love you, neovim, but you are so trusting!)
OpenBSD has been around for most of my 20+ career in this industry and it's sort of always been this aggressively reliable paperweight of a distro. I'm never quite sure what to do with it (NixOS is my go-to for my workstations -- NixOS + Wayland + Sway + Alacritty + Neovim is as close to godliness as a user interface can come) but OpenBSD finds its uses, and in those uses, it is smooth and heavy and reliable, making it the perfect foil for the rest of my infra: For where NixOS is neurotic and brittle, OpenBSD is saturnine and malleable.
I think of my infra as sort of being like a knife blade, with a glittering Nixos/Wayland/Neovim edge supported by a soft, heavy core of OpenBSD.
If everything else breaks, so long as I have my OpenBSD instances, I can recover.
One final word: At my end, I just finished upgrading my instance at openbsd.amsterdam; big shoutout to that amazing team for their incredible support. (Mischa, in particular, is a force of nature, and I am fan. ;D)