Communities should probably cautiously welcome VC funding for well-integrated community members solving hard, core problems with correctly-licensed contributions back to the community, as long as that effort doesn't divert community engineering focus away from long-term community goals and towards the startup's goals in non-beneficial way.
They should be more cynical about things that don't happen this way, but then they can keep doing their own thing anyway.
Ondsel found the money for two major core technical problems to be addressed in FreeCAD, and seems to have had a pretty positive impact on release-oriented thinking in general. They then folded. It is a loss, but essentially none of the work was lost.
Frankly I am not sure if the "written in Rust" element here is culturally beneficial in the long term or not; I don't know enough about Python or really anything about Rust.