You are correct that everybody can't get a first place trophy, or else it isn't really a first place trophy. We cannot all be the best.
That doesn't really matter though. In most cases you aren't competing with the rest of the world for a job. Typically you are competing against other applicants. In this more common scenario you just have to be better than the applicant pool, which is far less lofty (not that it matters). If there are 30 people that applied for an open position we can probably assume that between a third to a half are probably less qualified than the interviewers hoped for, so then you are realistically just competing against the remaining candidates that which is a lower number still.
In my original comment I mentioned my open source projects got me all but 1 of my last four jobs. The first of those occurred well before my software was popular and the company didn't even realize they were using it until it went up broken to NPM and broke their build. That madness didn't happen until after they interviewed me. During the interview I showed off my open source software just to demonstrate where I put my interests and how I am making effort to increase my personal productivity and solve original problems.
The software only became super popular during the prior employment.
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On a different note I don't consider myself something special like a 0.0000000000001% programmer or anything like that. The popularity of open source software projects is a unique spiral death trap. Keep in mind you are doing this on borrowed time at personal expense and for years people will ignore you (or tell you that your software is garbage and that you are completely wrong) and use inferior products that have a more familiar brand name.
Your software becomes popular if you can solve original problems and refocus continual effort on product quality. It took me years of effort and lots of people telling me I was wrong. I just did my own thing anyways and kept doing it because it was a personal project that worked well for me. And eventually it works for a couple of other people. It is extremely rare, but there are people who like to experiment using unknown software just for the hell of it (or simply because it is free). Those people create word of mouth recommendations. Rain drops become a trickle and if the rain never stops on a long enough timeline it becomes a flood.
It is a death cycle because as more people use it the demands upon the product greatly increase. Your available time does not scale proportionately. You prioritize and do what you can. You can mitigate some of this, though, if you are able to close defects at the speed of light and can get to a point where maintenance and improvements are faster enough to allow deeper engagement with your users.
The attention is nice and the idea of breaking promises or letting people down crushes my soul. That is how I feel about unfulfilled enhancement requests even though it is completely irrational. Completing those efforts are what made the software popular, so you feel a need to not let people down and to continue to complete the requests.