That assumes that every problem can be solved with money, and that the money (or the PRs the money funds) will be welcomed by the community. By talking about what OpenAI needs Bohan is hopefully starting a conversation with the community in order to engage with everyone respectfully and to work with them.
Railroading an open source project with money or dev time in order to force it to go in the direction you want is not the right way. Those things should be available if the community asks, but they shouldn't be the opening offer.
OK but then you lose the benefit of all future upstream changes and now you have to manage constant rebasing
Engaging the community and intelligently advocating for improvements is a way to contribute to projects as well, especially if you're willing to use a disposable forks to explore the design space, put forth RFCs, PRs, etc.
Oh the horror of having to do some rebasing in a world where LLMs do all the hard work for you anyway. And at an AI company with unlimited access to compute resources no less.
Railroading an open source project with money or dev time in order to force it to go in the direction you want is not the right way. Those things should be available if the community asks, but they shouldn't be the opening offer.