alt Hacker NewsYes that's all reasonable but the comparison is paying for (or giving them other revenue) corporations who also love to shuffle money around and can support causes you are actively against. The point being made was that people give causes trying to improve society more scrutiny than they give for-profit mega corporations who have in the past shown that they use their money for a lot of things detrimental to society.
Assuming there is a healthy market, then you have alternatives you can purchase your products and goods from. These alternatives may have other trade-offs and in fact, there may well be open and closed alternatives as well as hybrid options.
Some people simply want the "best fit" solution for a product. IMO, this used to be Outlook+Exchange, hands down... M365 scaling has enshittified the bundle in a lot of ways leaving a wide gap for alternatives. Google's GMail is a leading alternative that is a closed service. Thunderbird is an open solution that solves part of the problem (shared calendars/contacts only having half the solution).
When you pay for a product, you often are able to give feedback and request for features... the expectation is that you are getting value for what you are paying and that the company continues to do so while adding features that add more value in time.
When you donate to an open-source project, and that project redirects funds to have a multi-million dollar marketing event that only benefits middle managers and seeks to add revenue with features the majority of donors oppose, then someone who would otherwise support the development might rightly feel a bit betrayed or choose not to donate altogether, much like someone might not purchase a given product or service from a company that does what they feel are bad things.
It's not dramatically different, it's just when/where the individual might expect a level of transparency, value or direction. A purchase is against existing value... a donation is against future value.