> what has had FSF backing and been successful?
GCC is still indispensable. I doubt it will be rewritten in Rust any time soon.
GCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.
Off the top of my head: GCC, Emacs, coreutils, sed, grep, find, parallel, Guile, Coreboot, GNOME, GIMP, GnuPG, Bash
In each case, development is the work of the developers, and they themselves deserve most credit. But the FSF and the GNU project have certainly been involved with lots of software that is important, widely used, and works well.
GNU software is still responsible for huge and often critical chunks of the stack in most Linux distros.