Were they? I'd expect that even a project that becomes "awesome" was at best "okay" or "promising" at 6h.

Yes, we were all 6h old babies at some point. Some of us became great people, some of us became terrorists or worse. Takes some time to see where we end up with. No different for these resources, especially the repositories. If it's an internal tool that's heavily used, then made public with a wiped history, maybe your argument is correct but if it's a never-done-before/new approach to any problem, it needs some time to see the traction and proof.

There's also some form of outcome bias here. You're judging the resource/repository/library/whatever from today's learnings and standards, but it took this amount of time to reach here, maybe do-over multiple times, 100s or 1000s of commits and clearly none of these were there when it was only 6h old.

[delayed]

I don’t think Linux was very good 6 hours in