Pretty much every successful open source project that people pay attention to is one that has had long-term support behind it. Linux, Mozilla, gcc, clang, git. Almost always, that support begins with the original author.

Protects that don't do that are therefore unlikely to remain interesting for long.

Maybe I’m a cynic of all big corp companies but if you’ve ever worked with a big corp open source department that’s almost the entire point is to build PR for the engineering department. Same goes for tech blogs. These things will be PR pieces first, and valid production tools/frameworks second (mostly).

In my experience software gets written in the first place for the usual internal reasons. Corporate or individual prestige may be the driving factor in open sourcing, though, rather than a genuine interest in having it used externally.