> It’s more like being a chef and paying another company to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.

That would be like a Hypervisor company paying VMWare to re-distribute ESXi or something.

But a farm company buying VMWare ESXi to run its IT infra instead of using, say, CentOS is exactly like a chef sourcing ingredients instead of growing them herself.

That is not the same analogy, because a chef's job is to make food, but say a trucking companies job is not to create GPS and mapping software, or some HR tool which tracks sick days etc... The difference is what the core competency of the company is.