> worth that much kindness to begin with?

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I don't know that directing some funding towards the open-source project that is the foundation of your whole tech stack is really "kindness" per se.

When you are vending a devtool to other open-source developers, and making a lot of hay about the specific technology choice, it's basically marketing spend. It's also often a way of buying favour (attention to issues, PRs, etc) from the project maintainers...