For another example, Sublime Text (a for profit text editor written by a small group of developers) is massively less popular than VS Code, which is the bloated work of a small army.

Were you around in the Sublime 1/2 days? It used to be massively more popular than the alternatives, including Code, Brackets, Atom, etc. They fell behind because they cost 70 (then 80, now 100) USD and weren't as versatile or quickly iterative.