My point was, a lot of the early corporate support were smallish companies built specifically around Linux. RedHat is the perfect example of that, it started as a university project to make a distro.

It took a while (and a lot of pain) to get a lot of driver vendors to come fully into the project, yet Linux was already gaining a bunch of traction at that time (say last half of 90s).

I'll give you that Intel was always more or less a good actor though! But Google didn't exist when Linux already mattered. And when Google was created, they definitely benefited a lot from it, basing much of their infra on it.

Marketing needs (and laywer approval) can bring support faster than most things. Opus for audio is a good example of that too.