>More money = More developers.
There was actually another "kickstart" before that kickstart.
Blender's open-source timeline has a very unusual history in that it was a commercial product funded by €4.5 million in VC capital. Those original investors lost their money by selling in a "down round" to a 2nd set of investors. Those later investors also then lost their money by selling back the source code for a discount of 100k EUR to today's non-profit Blender organization.
https://docs.blender.org/api/htmlI/x115.html
One of the reasons (but not the only reason) that other examples of open-source projects like ... Gimp lagging Photoshop, or FreeCAD not being as polished as Fusion360/SolidWorks ... is those tools never had millions in investor money paying the salaries of 50 developers to kickstart them. E.g. FreeCAD has a non-profit fund but it doesn't attract the same mindshare as Blender did in 2002: https://www.google.com/search?q=freecad+non-profit+fund
Just because Blender started a fund doesn't mean any open-source project can also just "start a development fund" and attract the same level of donations. Blender has some extra history and circumstances in the timeline of "cause & effect" that a random open-source project can't easily replicate.
Blender circa ~2002 had a level of mindshare + evangelism + momentum that most open-source projects do not have. Those ingredients have to be there first to help attract donations to the fund.
