I just threw them a small donation for supporting this software for so long, even if it's only 98% how I'd want the project to be run all these years myself.
Your signing point is not accurate. It doesn’t apply to all packages, only casks in the official tap. With casks the trust model, particularly on things that auto-update and don’t expose versions or checksums on download URLs, heavily relies on Apple’s security guardrails. We pushed against them for a while but Apple’s direction of travel made it clear that it was a waste of our energy and that we were at risk of compromising our users through doing so.
You can still automatically remove quarantine in third-party taps as desired, we’re just making it less easy to do so because we consider it a security feature that should require a deliberate bypass.
I don’t think anyone is obliged to donate to Homebrew but this sort of framing, assuming you use Homebrew, isn’t great. If you find what we do morally distasteful: go use something else. MacPorts, Mise and Nix are all good. This will be better for everyone than using us begrudgingly.