We don’t appreciate the maintainers much. Look at Linux, Git or any other open source project. The initial inspiration was absolutely needed but continued maintenance culture is what made them successful and have lasted decades.
the maintainers are doing excellent and praiseworthy work, but this is not just a result of 'culture' but also incentives: if they aren't sufficiently responsive to user needs, they'll quickly find themselves maintaining software with a user base of only themselves
the problem with this theory is that it can't explain the absence of successful forks of python 2, wikipedia, and firefox