I don’t disagree but there are many corporate contributors who are getting paid based on the success of the optimizations and features they upstream to the kernel. At FAANG it’s the same metrics-based success you refer to.
Sure, but if any one of those corporate contributors could merge any change they wanted into the kernel they could likely get way more "metrics" gain, but they can't, because that's not the goal of the kernel team. The gains of one corporation are secondary to the gains of everyone.
Those corporations work together to contribute to the same open source code base and at the same time they are trying to (commercially) kill each other. Quite a wonder.
Kinda reminds me a bit of the operations of the nation states and counties of past Europe…
Or maybe somewhat similar to biological evolution: competition and cooperation.
Good point. But there’s not one such paradigm ruling the whole process of developing Linux. I guess we actually could say there are competing paradigms.