I think the coolest thing about open source is that I keep discovering new tricks inside GDAL that make my life better, and I can instantly also run those tricks in an R or Python or whatever environment because those ecosystems are building on the same fundamental bricks
In general, open source development patterns mean that improvements to one low-level component can have exponential benefits as that change gets incorporated down the dependency chain
It's easy to see why FOSS was originally a sort of utopian ideal