Is this really more shady, than making millions of USD with donations, you get from your users by pretending to need the money to support your family?

Michael Gundlach made enough money with AdBlock that he hired people to run AdBlock and don't work himself anymore. But he is way less transparent about it, than the guys from Adblock Plus. AdBlock has even closed their public source repository and issue tracker, to disguise who they are and what they are doing. I have never seen that any FOSS project ever did that before.

For example have a look at ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Extensions/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom/*/stats.js. There you find rather interesting code, that silently sends data about your configuration, environment along with a unique user id to their server.

For me AdBlock looks way more shady. While Adblock Plus just has found a business model, which might be controversial. But at least they are transparent about what they are doing.