When you assume inherent complexity exists, and competition exists, it works out fine. The consumers will always require some support for any complex OSS, but they want to minimize it (by finding OSS with reduced accidental complexity). OSS are incentivized to increase accidental complexity, but they’re capped by reputation and competition.
Of course, you can work around the core incentives (eg by marketing), and a lack of competition changes everything (consumers take whatever they can get, producers sell as high as they possibly can without bankrupting the consumer), but in a well-behaving market it should be fine.
Your RH-upstreams examples can probably be sufficiently explained by lack of competition, due to a captured market. Which isn’t behavior specific to OSS, but to every market. Notably, breaking RH’s stranglehold would be naturally easier than say apple’s
Of course, you can work around the core incentives (eg by marketing), and a lack of competition changes everything (consumers take whatever they can get, producers sell as high as they possibly can without bankrupting the consumer), but in a well-behaving market it should be fine.
Your RH-upstreams examples can probably be sufficiently explained by lack of competition, due to a captured market. Which isn’t behavior specific to OSS, but to every market. Notably, breaking RH’s stranglehold would be naturally easier than say apple’s