Speaking from big tech, you get things like rust (mozilla) or React (facebook) when your engineers are given the space to solve industry scale problems. Those are both "weird nerd" contributions since the original creators weren't interested in the celebrity public facing side of it.

In the React case, I'm not sure it would have become the framework it is today unless Dan Abramhov pushed it outside of the company. That took an insane amount of effort and skill to do that, especially at the time when Angular was quickly establishing itself.

Rust required an entire company to organize behind it and Mozilla spent a fortune getting it on its feet. Otherwise, I am not sure it would have been more than an experiment on someone's laptop, long forgotten.

I'm not sure what the solution for that is, or how else you push through all of the noise. Every great discovery and advancement in history is driven by the folks who can sell their hard work or at least have someone else willing to do it for them.