Maybe it depends? In my city, the online map shows only 2 Meshcore nodes, while Meshtastic 36 nodes.

And I've never spent time learning about it, but I'm under the impression Meshtastic is all about open-source and closer to ham radio philosophy, while Meshcore is backed by some for-profit organization?

Meshcore is MIT licensed open source firmware. There are both open source and closed source client softwares. You get to choose which you support. I think that's where the confusion comes in. It's no more for-profit than Meshtastic, which gets revenue from partnerships with hardware vendors