The Vim/Neovim is a great natural experiment on this.

Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it.

And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim users who take the time to think about their editors, customize them, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.