With free software you can validate the code quality and tweak and share code as you wish. With AI slop becoming more prevalent this means choosing quality software is much easier. This is especially true given that many proprietary software companies are switching to AI which will harm them in the long run.
In short, free software is human focused. It doesn’t have economic incentives for the most part so it will always be as good as the community around it.
It’s definitely possible. I always filed those groups more under the cheerleading (and technical support) column, but it’s entirely possible that (especially with much less money in the ecosystem) they exerted some power in the community. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we lost “the funnel,” recently, with even the Software Freedom Day people now strongly recommending against using events to try to sell people on Free Software…