> Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to today?
Majority of work on Linux is done by people who are paid by their employers to do exactly that. Just look at this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-...
Google involved in Linux is mainly not through their donations to Linux Foundation, but through code written by Google employees on the clock.
Is this perhaps though a result of most projects allowing donations, and some companies (e.g. Google) having a lot of capital to throw around and funding them more-or-less just because? Would Linux not still exist in a similar form to today?
Also, I would add things like the GNU project, and notably VLC media player, alongside OpenSSH and the BSD stuff.
I agree with your final point, though. I can't actually think of a company whose product only in-house FOSS software. Red Hat, Suse, Purism, etc are building off community code, not something primarily developed internally. And companies like MongoDB make all of their money off of non-free cloud products.
One that I can think of that was once like this, the Subsonic media player, actually went closed source due to too many people re-hosting the code and not paying the maintainer.