In the last 4 years I've noticed an increase in marketing things vs making them better. Here are some tricks I've learned about and am now more wary about. Purely my own opionions as an open source person.
We know it is often the case that ideas are not executed, or poorly executed. When people quit google to make a startup competing with their employer, it is tempting to claim they invented something invented at google. You can tell this when people clarify that they "really made" X. This hints they didn't make it. Regardless of who invented something, there is value in popularizing it (provided the "it" was a good idea). There's possibly most value in enduring it through support.
It can be strange that a big company would allow a small company to literally compete with them and misattribute simultaneously. First, check to see if it is california, if so, that's probably the answer :) Also, a big company maybe doesn't want the publicity of picking on a smaller one, or maybe they want to reacquire it later. Maybe the person who quit has friends inside who provide a political shield. Main point is don't expect this to resolve from natural forces.
To dig deeper, if that something was based on a paper, look at all the authors. Probably there's someone you've never heard about.. suspect maybe they had something to do with it! If you are really lucky, you can find an insider who can tell you what really happened, even if they are likely unable to say this out loud. Check to see if they worked at the place long enough to endure any problems it might have caused. In other words, check the dates. When did they leave? If over 5 years ago, most claims of "really making x" are probably irrelevant in product decisions.
Above all said, the experience of making something, popularizing something, and supporting something are often not the same people. To understand an X involves less central focus, eventhough it isn't required to understand all the things.
If nothing else from this section, basically ignore "I invented google" stuff and look at what they are actually selling and if that is of use to you or not. One way is to replace in marketing pitches the word "google" with "shit" and if you still want to use the product despite them inventing shit, it was meant to be.
One of the weirdest tricks it attribution of using something which isn't actually used. There can be a few reasons for this. For example, in a landgrab situation, it can be tempting to label something as standard that's scarcely more than dung. To create a perception of use of dung isn't intuitive at first, until you consider marketing. Marketing moves at an unrelated pace to adoption, and if anything it is ahead of adoption (though sometimes behind it!). Strangely, there is marketing value, sometimes measurable in tens of thousands otherwise spent on conference talks, to say you use or support something that you don't.
To look deeper into this, first see if there is open source at work. Sometimes the "use" is actually completely labeling and there is no code or protocol related to the brand stamped on the project. That's pretty much misattribution. Sometimes the use is a facade and you can't see any internals as they are closed source. This might be a "logo bucket" project. Check to see if there are any issues or users involved.. sometimes there are none, or issues are super old! It could be an alliance thing. Check to see if there are blogs, but literally no code apart from what's created by dev evangelism. You can sometimes tell someone isn't using something because their facts are way off or years old.
This doesn't mean if you can't see signs of use that it isn't used, just maybe it isn't an important differentiator. Let's assume the project is usable, actually has code related to the marketing label, and non-vendors are raising and/or solving issues. If a company marketing X has a core dependency, likely they will also be raising issues or discussing concerns maybe even arguing and likley not always losing. Zero activity upstream could be a sign of casual use, not strategic use, indifference, backdoor collaboration, or maybe it isn't a signal at all.
Personally, I take some of the "use misattribution" lighter than the past for reasons including the limited ability to detect if something is actually not used, and the snafu many companies are in these days. I've heard from honest companies who otherwise would get no voice in the industry we created. Some have users who themselves were duped into using X, so they deal with it but aren't actual advocates. Consider how huge we helped CNCF become.. some honest companies will still feel this urge to falsely attribute to get a seat at the table that could otherwise cost large sponsorships.. sad but true. OTOH, I don't think use misattribution has any place in real open source.
TODO: