I’m pretty sure curl is developed by a team these days even if Steinberg is project leader. And he doesn’t do it for free anymore. But your point stands.

I also seem to remember that “random person from Nebraska” from the original XKCD is real. Oh yes, ImageMagick. Here’s an interesting article that also seems to reflect OP’s edit:

Except the random person in Nebraska has been replaced by AWS, Google Cloud, or whoever caused the outage this week. And that kind of bothers me, because it misses the point entirely.