Is funding better or worse than corporate sponsorship? The most successful (depending on your metric of course) projects have been backed by corporate dollars. Also, not every project can be a Go or Angular with a multi-billion dollar company behind it.
All of the CPAN mirrors are paid for by somebody. Nothing's free; money is in the equation at some point.
Of course, that's a different model than VC funding. However, you're intimating that NPM isn't "real" with your last statement. The project has run for several years now. This isn't some project that came out of the chute with funding (such as Meteor).
Similar model is GitHub: long-running project/organization, took VC after a few years. In the time since they took the VC, have they become corrupted? Are they not a real community?
The difference is in the goal. Donated/sponsored dollars don't expect to get dollars back. VC invested dollars expects invested_dollars * multiple in return.
It's amazing how things have changed in 10 years.
CPAN.
Perl.
A real community of programmers, system admins, enthusiasts.