I reason to this because software in hardware produces revenue only during hardware sales which typically fall off after the initial wave. Without continual revenue your business model goes upside down when you have developers for whom you don't have any work. So we get bullshit work and eventually we get 'RMR' or recurring monthly revenue because well we need to pay these folks.
Of course building an enterprise like that would require retooling your process with massive emphasis on sustainable build tools that are 'done' and similarly libraries. We massive documentation on taking the product firmware out of the archive and re-createing the entire build / test workflow with new developers.
A company like that might have 500 developers during initial product development and first shipments, that then reduces down to 10 or fewer for maintenance needs.
The surprising thing is that a lot of open source is actually kind of like this, a new 'thing' is out there and the number of people making contributions grows, and then it is 'shipped' or 'done' and the number of contributors reduces down to a handful, sometime zero, developers. Growing again when a zero day or CVE needs to be fixed and then back to zero. Because its OSS nobody is paying them, or maybe they are being paid by another company that uses the package and needs a fix, but the whole software development model is going to be completely changed over the next 10 - 20 years.
