There’s no need to overthink this (who they are, what they’re up to, etc.). Of course, they don’t have many followers when there’s nothing to use (yet). Even if the followers are fake, I don’t care.
Anyone who gets a grant has to deliver a detailed proposal before anything begins to happen (such as a council vote).
Then the grant is voted on and may be just a partial amount depending on the quality, scope, etc.
Then nothing is paid until working code is delivered in stages.
Then after the whole thing is delivered, the grant is paid in full.
Grants don’t get paid for some future success of the applicant. As useful deliverables (mostly code) get delivered, XX tokens get paid out. That’s it. We don’t need to guess whether they’ll make 0 or 1 million XX from services contained in the grant application.
Risks are managed and small. Even if the project never gets completed, grant deliverables are by (grant) design meant to be reused by other builders on xx Chain/xx Network.
I only think other Substrate chains are more suitable for NFT-related development and the grant doesn’t make use of the key tech of xx Network, cMixx, which is why I’d like to see a smaller grant for cMixx-specific features if the project can make use of cMixx. If there’s no use case for cMixx, I am not concerned about the plan as such, but I don’t find xx Chain integrations valuable because such code won’t find much reuse and xx Chain doesn’t have some key related features which will make it less likely that the project succeeds.