Considering that the whole industry, including the big AI companies, is built on top of open source now, I would have to say it did matter. That doesn't mean every project mattered (in a larger sense), but certainly thousands of open source projects have value, and dozens have contributed enormous value. The fact that the value has been disconnected from the maintainers has been a problem for a long time, but it is getting worse, and this is one example of a maintainer near the breaking point.

I feel like projects can be successful without being popular.