He also built a totally from scratch operating system, and built a very productive and skilled community around it, which branched into building their own web browser as SerenityOS has an 'everything from scratch' policy. How is Serenity not an interesting feat of engineering?
You seem to call it a 'toy' because of where the development is at - this is grossly unfair criticism. By your measure, is all software that isn't at a 100% finished state a toy?
Neither Serenity nor Libweb are interesting. They are just copy of things we already did decades ago with nothing new to propose and severe NIH. They offer nothing of value above other open source projects which already do what they propose better (call that unfinished if you want). Heck, you can grab a 20 years old copy of Minix and find things which are infinitely more interesting than Serenity. Or Redox which while not trying to push the state of the art in design is written in memory safe language if you want something new.
Ladybird and Serenity are famous because of streaming not because of what they offer. It’s influencer culture applied to open source which I despise. But unsurprisingly it’s a magnet for big co money which wants a cheap shot at being in the limelight.
Ladybird exists and is funded because its main author is an influencer with a public on YouTube, not because it’s an interesting feet of engineering. Like Serenity before, I expect its main achievement will be generating content.
To each their own but what a waste of funding which could have gone to more interesting but less trendy things (like Servo).