How are projects like this created?

This github repo is 6 months old, they already have 18+k stars and over 800 forks.

This looks like some overfunded pseudo-FOSS shit. Make the bare minimum open source and sell the rest to enterprises.

Why not take the money and really fund an existing project like kanboard or redmine?

I mean ffs kanboard is at least 10 years old and has less than 8k stars on github.