But many large companies, like Brendan's, _do_ contribute to large projects that they use. To successfully adopt big pieces of OSS infrastructure, large companies often want some assurance that their bug fixes, performance improvements, and possibly feature additions can be upstreamed without too much pain.

It's hard to get brilliant jerks to accept new ideas. It's hard to motivate your engineers to invest deeply in toxic, unfriendly ecosystems. Of course, extreme technical success can outweigh many of these factors, but that's the exception and not the rule.