One thing that OSS has taught me is that brilliant people are everywhere. And the majority of them don’t work for FB or Google. Being paid to work on OSS, free advertising, free and often unearned ethos, and the ability to quit and have the project to live on.
I think we'll eventually find a sustainable infrastructure for dealing with all these hidden essential people. Maybe a lightweight grant system or something. I remember when The Linux Foundation started paying the financially-struggling maintainer of NTP:https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke …