Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding capability also create value in the form of skills and knowledge.
It’s hard to identify and quantify those whose contributions helped most, but I feel all contributions are worthwhile. Not all code may be tip-worthy, but I don’t feel chagrin toward those collecting, however they do so.
> Only three projects—less than 3 percent of the study’s sample—had more than 50 contributors.[1]
[1] https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer...
They may, but my point here is that the reason a corporate SWE's code is so valuable isn't because of the code itself. It's because of the ecosystem that the SWE and corp are a part of. That ecosystem serves to multiply a meaningless block of code into a couple million dollars that can be split nicely with all the non-coders who made it useful. Without that ecosystem, an open source project can never hope to monetize to the same level. That big open source projects have substantial funding is an effect of being so imminently usable in those million dollar ecosystems that the forgotten scraps of the corporations are enough to sustain them.