I recall Ton Roosendaal saying something similar about the origins of Blender: convincing his then-employers to let him open source the original abandoned engine was a huge hassle, but the lack of third party code blocking it helped a lot.
On one hand, at one point we had CEO and CTO publicly stating in townhalls that they want us to be a technological forefront and looking for ways to showcase our capabilities. At the same time it was virtually impossible to open source even something as trivial as a string formatting library, because once you started talking to stakeholders about approval their POV was that it's part of a project that took X amount of employees Y amount of time and that equation is in millions, so that has to be really valuable.
hell, when I joined the frontend circus in 2013 I was flabbergasted that most people needed to install 3rd party library to perform "isEven(num)" operation
... not to mention that aforementioned library had at least 3 dependencies itself.
