And look how many Linux distro producing companies there are that are the size of Google or that earn even a significant fraction of what Google earns.
Linux is a totally different ballgame. It started out with open source and free access in mind. Linux distros are often made by volunteer developers who do it for the love of the game, non-profit companies, or companies that have found some way to monitize it like RHEL. And companies certainly pay for support, standardization, and exhaustive stability validation. There’s also the commercial use of Red Hat’s customizations, and arguably faster responses to patching vulnerabilities.
Five months later I log back into Lemmy, so sorry for the ancient reply, but I wanted to thank you for correcting my misconception.