Yep they're full-time marketing people, not random devs taking time out of their day to respond.

Very rarely do devs at these companies feel comfortable enough to respond directly, I think, that's natural because most people aren't comfortable representing the company they work for. Usually when you see that happen, it's some coordinate effort internally to get a dev from some team to respond.

https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/marketing/developer-ev...

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

every dev tools startup out there does this.