The “advertising” might work. The hard part is of course that the developer needs to know there’s an in house solution to Problem X before he realizes he has Problem X. Because developers tend to be natural problem solvers once they know they have Problem X their natural tendency is to tackle it, not to step back and wonder if somebody in the building has already solved it. And of course the other part of the problem is people tend to have tunnel vision, until they have to tackle Problem X most people don’t give a crap if anybody has a solution. So it all combines to put you in a position where you need to tell everybody you have that solution, knowing they don’t actually care, and hoping they remember when it matters.
I totally agree with you on the basics. Compare though with high level languages and frameworks. Every programmer knows that you refer to the API to get the most knowledge about modern programming - to use the language or framework that they’re using. Projects are defined all the time to include such tools. Engineers are interviewed to determine whether they can use them, or learn them. When a system comes along like HLL, that is designed to support sharing and reuse, then a similar situation exists for specialized application components.