Standards work is about coming together and working on reaching a shared consensus on a thing. We don't do corporate politics, or government politics, at standards meetings nor venues.
Sure, you can disagree on things outside of the standards world, but within, the only thing that matters is advancing the standards and building them right.
Like, when running the ActivityPub Trust and Safety taskforce, we had Meta employees show up to our meetings, and they were genuinely helpful (volunteering for instance to scribe the meeting, which is like one of the hardest jobs to fill at a standards meeting), and when they joined I had to repeat that golden rule of standards: we leave corporate politics and our company's at the door.
We did have one or two people mad that they were present, but luckily I didn't have to explicitly remind anyone of the W3C code of conduct which governs those meetings.
Standards work is truly a bit weird like that. It takes a lot of discipline to separate out those things severance style: an innie and an outie with regards to the standards work.
Finally, we live under capitalism, or at least the vast majority of us do (it's always interesting when someone from the CCP shows up at a standards meeting!), and living under capitalism means everything revolves around money.
W3C membership ain't cheap: membership dues start at like €2,000 and go up to like €60,000 or something.
As an Invited Expert, I'm allowed to participate without paying the W3C. However, I still need to be paid for my time, because time equals money under capitalism for 99% of us.
Bluesky stepping up to fund this work is a genuinely good thing, regardless of what you may think of bluesky as a company or social app.
There weren't really any other companies with an interest in decentralized social that could fund work at this scale. An NLNet grant probably wouldn't be workable for this, and operates at a much slower pace.
Anyway, hopefully that gives you a better idea of how standards are built and funded.