Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.

The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)

It did not start from scratch as OSS.

It's not uncommon that someone champions the release of a project as open source and I think that is something we should encourage.

Blender was commercial software that cost money. After the company went bankrupt, the former CEO and a bunch of Blender users got together and raised enough money to buy out the source code and made it open source.

I don't think Blender can really be called a clone of anything other than in the most superficial sense. Certainly when Blender was first being release it looked and worked like nothing else in the industry, often much to its detriment.

"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.