Those clones that you speaks of are often of questionable quality. Unless we're talking about creality printers, which were open source(at least with the Ender 3), and are also low quality.

But my question is "what's the point?" If you have an open source project and yet the commmunity is largely uninvolved in its development, why do you even care to be open source?

Yes, freedom is important, but hardly anybody but developers take advantage of it. The most important aspect of FOSS is that it's a marker of a project/product that won't take advantages of its users with shady business practices, and that's probably the most important thing about it.