This is truth, but not the whole truth. Beside money, you need somebody with a right vision at helm.
Look at the direction modern Gnome goes. They have the money from Red Hat and Canonical. BTW systemd too was developed by salaried employees of Red Hat. Money makes things happen, but not always the nicest things.
I disagree. Even with money, there's too much fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem, and while choice is nice, the parts often don't play well with each other. What Linux needs is more big companies taking over and forcing their direction. Ubuntu and Fedora did a lot for desktop Linux, because they forced some controversial decisions upon the community, instead of being stuck in endless battle of supporting every legacy toolkit and supporting every fork that comes up whenever a controversial decision occurs.