It is, mostly, the organization Linus created (and of course the enormous number of people participating).

An absurd amount of weight is carried by a small number of very influential people that can and want to just do a good job.

And a signal that they're the best is you don't see them in the news.

We need more very influential people who aren't newsworthy.

The most direct comparison would be the package manager, that's why I said distros. These driver management tools do a (poor) job at being a package manager, along with many other commercial software installation tools.

With Linux itself, it helps that they are working in public (whether volunteering or as a job), and you'd be sacked not in a closed-door meeting, but on LKML for everyone to see if you screw up this badly.