I very much hesitate to say anything about the elephant in the room regarding open source. The one thing I do think I can say without question is that anyone who characterizes reproducibly rebuilding an operating system from the provided source code as a trivial task of "hobbyists" grossly underestimates the amount of time, attention, effort and agility needed by any software distribution's infrastructure team to successfully produce a pile of bits that actually boots and runs on modern hardware.
I am referring of course to https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes which reads in part (in bold type no less)
Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity.
Reproducible builds are very hard. There are so many things that can go wrong in building software before it works, and so many precise elements (compiler versions, libraries, headers, build-time instructions and variables) that all have to line up exactly right for a system to be able to be reconstructed "without changing it in any way". I look at NixOS as one example of a system that does rebuild cleanly, but boy howdy it's hard work to get all those pieces parts working exactly right together.
The other use of the term "elephant" has to do with software projects that have one large institutional maintainer. "Elephant risk" is characterized not by any of the obvious metrics of project health - contributor count, bug handling, vulnerability mitigation, good documentation etc - but by the hard to measure risk that the "elephant" will change its mind due to changing corporate priorities. I have seen perfectly reasonable software systems become suddenly untouchable as a consequence of private equity buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, or even personal problems in a founder or project leader's life. Unfortunate decisions by leadership can prompt people who were otherwise comfortable in their previous path to look around and look hard at options.
As to hobbyists, I have seen home labs that have put enterprise operations to shame.