I’m aware, sometimes they also provide funding for FOSS projects. Funding seems to be the option FFmpeg would prefer based on the title (though I’ve not explicitly seen a quote that says this).

If it’s a specialty codebase written entirely in assembly, as this seems to be, sometimes it just makes sense to pay someone else to do it rather than spending 3x as long getting someone in house to do because the expertise isn’t there. Or just put a bounty on it, another common way to provide funding in FOSS.

If Google said, look we know we send a lot of bug reports, here’s 50MM a year, go hire a team of dedicated developers to deal with our nonsense, we don’t have the expertise in house to train them on this codebase. I doubt anyone would be complaining.

Nothing wrong with fixing bugs even if they are obscure if you have the time and resources.

Google’s pull for most is the camera. Graphene is a vanishingly small % of pixel users (estimated 200k total graphene users vs estimated 15M+ pixels in the US alone).