Redis Labs required would-be contributors to sign a CLA to hand over their copyright. If ValKey doesn’t require that, it alone could account for the difference.
I wouldn’t sign a CLA to anyone other than maybe the FSF.
Right, but that CLA stemmed directly from the decision that they needed to monetize better & change their licenses.
Point remains: there's a more than small irony here that a company wasn't doing well/was struggling with open source, but could perhaps have done great if the help freshly created has been at all available when they were fully open source.
I wouldn’t sign a CLA to anyone other than maybe the FSF.