They are not developed by a 'community'. The developers who build it are paid for by investors. Those investors want a huge return. It's not open source, it's bait and wait

Exactly, when you take a look at the mainstream "open-source" projects, you 'll see that those projects are all developed and maintained by some people who gets paid to do that. (e.g. Kubernetes, Firecracker, Gvisor, Bottlerocket, Podman)

Bait and wait and ... But what's step 3? Doesn't seem to work super well, hmm

MySQL was acquired for 1B. Elastic is currently worth 10B. Redhat was acquired for 34B.

What's not working well?

Good points. So step 3 can be to do an exit, when the software is really popular.

I wonder what's next for Elastic. And mongodb etc. And all their users and customers

When open-source companies develop the majority of their product, haters will complain that they’re “not open enough”.

When open-source companies invite more contributions from their community, haters will complain that they’re “harassing the community for monetization”.

Simply put, some people will never be happy no matter what Docker does, and clearly you are one of them.

There's a silent majority size x100? that is happy with both approaches :-) look at Actix-web for example (when the founder quit), the happy but silent people were like 500x more than the a bit angry ones