Why not? I'd be more inclined to give my money to a company too, if I knew they were playing nicely in the community, and contributing positively to the ecosystem of one of my own personal pet projects.

It's not a standard that most people will use to decide, but most people don't love software... but if you do love your software and it's not leading-edge anymore (or even if it is, I don't know much about modern Perl development and I assume that is because it's unfashionable...) you want companies that also love that software to do well, and keep putting their improvements back into the upstreams.