Honest question: How does that help nowadays? Certainly in the early 90s, browsing the GNU ftp site was terrific for discovery, and in the 80s, GNU tapes were even more powerful, but nowadays, GNU seems to be irrelevant for discovery. I can't think of a single software project in the last 20 years that I've discovered through its GNU association. Similarly, GNU used to be important as an infrastructure provider for open source software, but nowadays is one hosting option among many, and not a particularly attractive one.
GNU has never helped much in developing software, the individual projects always stood and fell with their maintainers. So it seems to me that nowadays people put their projects under the GNU umbrella mainly because they buy into a particular worldview of how software should be licensed.