I would like to mention also digital sovereignty outside of the US (in my case in Europe), as maybe one reason there are less contributors, because of Fedora being more US-centric than other distros (Debian is more international, openSUSE is more European, etc).

Basically, why would you *contribute* to a project which benefits primarily to a US company (Red Hat), while your country or continent is trying to rely less on the US big tech?

Another reason for volunteers: why would you work for free to a project which benefits primarily to a company? (This is also true for distros like openSUSE). It would be better of course to be paid for that work. At this point, a distribution like Debian or Gentoo seems more appealing for contributors.