I think you're right that Canonical creates and releases projects and assumes they are in charge of them, but I disagree about Red Hat (honestly not sure what you mean by "rough ideas and code"), I think they tend to see whats already out there and then throw their weight behind that, then only if there isn't do they create their own and even then they are more open about how the project runs. That difference means Red Hat gets more momentum behind its projects, and that is what counts. (of course RH can throw more engineers at stuff as well, and that also helps a lot)

Its not some sort of conspiracy, nothing Canonical has ever done has had the same amount of hate as systemd has, its just a difference in approach.

My experience with Red Hat is that it's frequently IKEA level assembly required. Canonical projects tend to be read the docs and just use it. Although there are some exceptions. For example a couple of years ago, cloud-init was not documented well enough for my taste. Took a second look just now and found new documentation that may revise my opinion.

Or rather because they're proprietary, often closed-source, like Snap server.