They existed even before Hive existed. It started out as steem basic income or something like that. They forked the basic income units with the steem/hive fork. They didn't have to do it.

Is the project eternal? Of course not. Nothing is eternal. Nothing stops the person/people managing it from selling it, or one day they need the money and just close, or the business gets into a deficit and they have to stop. Those are possibilities. There's also a possibility that Hive goes to 0.

So far, HBSI has been incredible and gave me upvotes every single post for a long time. So yeah, they are much better than all those whales who not only have ever given me an upvote, some also gave me DVs.