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A number of years ago, when LessWrong was being revived from its old form to its new form, I did not expect the revival to work. I said as much at the time. For a year or two in the middle there, the results looked pretty ambiguous to me. But by now it's clear that I was just completely wrong--I did not expect the revival to work as well as it has to date.
Oliver Habryka in particluar wins Bayes points off of me. Hooray for being right while I was wrong, and for building something cool!
This is about what I was going to say in response, before reading your comment.
I think the key factor that makes it different from other examples is that it was a competent person's full time job.
There are some other things that need to go right in addition to that, but I suspect that there are lots of things that people are correctly outside view gloomy about which can just be done, if someone makes it their first priority.
Just to be clear. There were people working on it who had both agency and competence, but they were working on it as a side project. I think having something be someone's only priority and full-time job makes a large difference on how much agency someone can bring to bear on a project.