You have it backwards.

The beloved projects were already successful without those paychecks, hence why those companies took an interest in them in the first place and didn't (at least publicly) try to create their own alternatives knowing that they wouldnt be able to compete.

Since the companies have been in the extend phase of their EEE logic, their contributions to open source have been helpful, granted.

I have been around long enough, hence why I can offer some reality checks.

> 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

The C language it was written on, has come into existence thanks to AT&T paychecks, landing on Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan bank accounts.

You omitted:

> 1996: Version 2.0 of the Linux kernel is released. The kernel can now serve several processors at the same time using symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and thereby becomes a serious alternative for many companies.

Linux had been around for half a decade at that point, and companies took note and reacted accordingly in 1998.

Until 1998 was a toy kernel, that barely worked except in very special cases, as someone that tried to use 1.0.9 with IDE CD-ROMs in 1994, or fighting with X modeline for the graphics card to display a barely working 800x600 in 1996, will recall.

Only after those guys stepped in, it matured to something that would compete with Solaris, during the 2000's dotcom wave.

Ask yourself, why would large multinational corps step in to save a failing product that isn't their own, unless that product was a serious contender that threatened their bottom line.

To outsource development costs.

I don’t understand the proposed reality they (we) should live in.

They are trying to advocate for software that doesn’t hurt its users in a sea of enshittifaction.

They should stop because corporations produce powerful software?

It isn't a matter of proposed reality, rather the fact that somehow bills have to be paid, and all key FOSS projects happen to one way or the other, have developers paid by all big corps that people love to hate.

While this is of course true, there's nothing wrong with lamenting this state of affairs. In an ideal world, this wouldn't be the case, but since it is you might as well do better personally.