Who in the world is John Van Sickle?
What do you do if you need to run FFmpeg on a fresh install of an operating system; if you spin up a VM, get a new computer, or - as happens a lot more in the world than all of those things combined - you build a docker image? For a lot of OS's, you can get the binaries from your package manager. However sometimes they won't offer them (or, better said, the default repositories won't, as is the case with Amazon Linux) or they might be out of date. What's your next step? I'm sure a lot of folks would say they would build the binaries from source. What does Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, suggest you do? Take a look at this official tutorial for AWS Lambda, about a quarter of the way down the page, and you'll see that they direct you to johnvansickle.com to get your FFmpeg binary. In fact, if you search something along the lines of "Amazon Linux install FFmpeg", the top few results all direct you to wget or curl from this site.
John hosts static binaries of FFmpeg, built from both the releases (going all the way back to 3.3) and the project's master git branch. Maintaining such a robust catalogue of builds is no small thing in itself, but then also serving this to a lot of the people who use FFmpeg on AWS is even more of a feat. If you navigate to John's site in your browser, you'll see that he has some donation links. If you're just following that AWS Lambda guide or the top search results I mentioned above, you won't see those links or probably even really consider John's time or effort or contribution to making your life a little easier.
This is probably one of the more minor examples of xkcd 2347, or maybe a slightly altered one where the label at the top is "digital infrastructure by lazy people". If John were to shut his site down who knows how many companies' build and deployment pipelines would just stop. On the other hand, its not terribly difficult to build FFmpeg from source. It would probably be a blip for a lot of engineers, an hour or two of trouble-shooting and maybe a few more to test. There are other things to consider of course - using statically built binaries made by a random guy on the internet isn't a great security practice - but overall its not that big of a deal. The biggest travesty is that whoever writes Amazon's tutorials doesn't care enough to direct the readers to their own ffmpeg-lambda-layer or to build from source.
Who is John van Sickle anyway?