The folks working on Asahi are terrific, and deserve credit where it’s due—most would have trouble contributing, especially at the pace they’re working at. They are experienced, driven, creative and overall good at what they do.
However, I think it’s also instructive to realize that ultimately, there really are plenty of top-tier developers out there who aren’t working on cool things like this, for one reason or another.
Asahi at least has funding. And while Patron funding isn’t new, it is relatively underutilized for open source. I believe the Patron model is the most promising avenue for open source projects to route money from willing participants. I may only contribute a relatively tiny amount, especially when you consider the wages you can get working for a well-funded SV company, but when you pool it altogether, it’s still nothing to sneeze at.
So in my mind, Asahi achieves success in the face of skepticism because it has the combination of great engineers and enough funding to meaningfully help the effort.
P.S. Even though I do that most graphics vendors have huge teams and Asahi is a strong outlier in this case, they probably have a lot of fish to fry that doesn’t yet or may never apply to the M1 graphics drivers. Valve has found success in writing their own Vulkan drivers; I’d love to know how much engineering effort went into that, both people and time. It might be a somewhat closer comparison. (Well.. not really, because it’s not taking into account the impressive reversing effort needed for M1, but perhaps in terms of actually writing the high level graphics drivers.)
P.P.S.: and also, I firmly believe that the ambition and drive to work on such hard problems is what breeds impressive engineers. In my opinion, you shouldn’t feel intimidated; you should feel inspired. Go out there and hack some hardware for yourself.