Yup. I don’t really get the perspective that people have, “oh, creators have to make money somehow, so it’s okay that they manipulate parasocial relationships to shift the products of exploitative businesses like gambling to kids, or snake oil more-harm-than-good VPNs, or the very worst paid versions of much better freely available services like Dashlane.”

Back in the day, people ran extremely ambitious projects, fan websites, services, etc. because they were passionate about it. Think about all of the free and open source software that you have used which hasn’t ever tried to guilt you into buying shit you didn’t need. Imagine if Audacity, LibreOffice, GIMP, VLC, Blender and 7-zip started showing forced ads for Raid Shadow Legends?

Asking for donations or patrons or whatever is totally fine. Even taking sponsorships for more ethical companies that you would recommend to others even without being paid isn’t too bad, but the attitude that content creators can’t be criticised for exploiting their audience because they have to pay their rent always rubs me wrong.