IIRC, this was what the connection poolers (pgpool, pgbouncer), and perhaps all now-popular postgres extensions/enhancements, looked like in their initial years

IIRC, this was what the connection poolers (pgpool, pgbouncer), and perhaps all now-popular postgres extensions/enhancements, looked like in their initial years, as well. In the context of a "large-scale service", my guess is that there's a chicken-and-egg problem, where an operators of such a service has to decide they want it to be production-ready enough to throw money and/or engineering resources at the project, which can attract yet more contributors.