What makes you think there are genuine open source projects that don't get traction? Ansible is still GPLv3 even while owned by RedHat^W IBM and works fine. Any one of the bazillions of front-end toolkits, build tools, bundlers, whatever, many initiated by some company and practically all under open source licenses.
My experience has been that if something is useful, and its open source license means one can fix bugs they encounter or at least have a small chance it'll remain around indefinitely (not go out of business) in order to bake it into your workflow, then it'll be adopted and blogged about and show up in HN and Reddit