There is an entire interesting rabbit hole dedicated to how much people hate Rob Levin (lilo). They talk about how he was a scammer, collected disability with his wife for ADHD, regularly misused his position in freenode to grift for money...
And the quibble about a couple of K's really grates on me. The guy founded freenode and kept it going. Let the donations fund his groceries.
I never knew of the hate until I befriended a few of the atheme people and they told me some of their side. I do think he misappropriated funds to survive which is unethical but I'm not mad at the spirit of it. I used to troll the staff a bit that netsplits were caused by the /shakedown command lilo put in to collect donations.
Unrelated, but freenode is weird among IRC networks. Other networks I went on would sometimes just ban people because they felt like it, not for any particular reason. The server donors were not allowed to give themselves O-Lines (IRC staff privs), this was an important distinction as well as it kept servers neutral, and later on was the reason they did not require a foundation with overhead. There was an incident that I believe they deleted off their blog where I think the Newark, NJ server was punted from the network for giving themselves an O-line without permission. So yes, the sale is weird because the assets should have only been the domain name and website. My guess on PIA wanting more was recommendations from their lawyers over GDPR crap but I don't really know or care.
Yes, he did try to make a living off freenode when he hit financial and professional difficulties, and people resented that, but he was unquestionably the founder and a major volunteer (though, by the time he asked for donations, one of many volunteers).
Many OSS projects moved off freenode (including some I was involved in) specifically because Lilo was pulling donors into chant and trying to convince them to fund freenode instead of the oss project they were on freenode to discuss. It was really sleazy and created a lot of well earned bad blood.
I don't think I ever saw anyone too irritated that lilo spent some donations on his living expenses.
Not only that, but for people who get by through exploitation of trust, doing anything to attract scrutiny from anyone generally doesn't work in your favor.