So there were efforts before the Noto fonts that were significantly better funded than they are now? Is there any publicly available documentation for this clai

So there were efforts before the Noto fonts that were significantly better funded than they are now? Is there any publicly available documentation for this claim? I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for OSS Unicode typefaces and the stuff from before Noto looks to mostly be collections of other OSS typefaces. Maybe MPH 2B Damase had some independent funding? I can't tell. But if these efforts had significant funding it is not apparent from their output. Based on the information I have available to me at this time, I can only conclude that the space of broad Unicode fonts is in a much better state now with Google's efforts on Noto than it would have been in the counterfactual where they did not make those efforts.