Blender has significant investment because users pay developers for its maintenance, yes.

VLC is mostly based on ffmpeg which didn't have much public commercial sponsorship for years, until the post-YouTube era, where there was some sponsorship from Google but mostly just a lot more small and large closed-source developers releasing crappy "video converter programs" and not crediting it.

It instead was mostly developed by a schizophrenic Austrian math genius in his free time from not being regularly employed, plus some other grad student types.