You're right that the damage to trustworthiness was always there. (I.e. they did the damage when they stopped publishing their source code, and they compounded that damage the longer they declined to publish their code). My point was more that the damage now seems to be directly attributable to the new payments integration.

Prior to seeing this post, I was already concerned that adding a crypto/payments integration would damage the Signal project, and this appears to be an immediate example of the kind of harms/perverse incentives I was concerned about.

(A counterargument to my theory here would perhaps be "Signal was always doing stuff like declining to publish their server code even prior to the payments integration", I'm not familiar enough with the history of the project to know the details there.)