It was described in open letter if I recall correctly, bottles is as special as any other project is to any other project, it depends on perspective. But beyond technical details - It is their decision as maintainers, you do not agree with it, I can understand it.
I read the drama in Twitter and PR.
While Bottles maintainer does not do a great job to politely prove the point of the patch to disable Bottles outside of sandboxed environments, he is not required to be a diplomat as mainter (though it would be better, of course) and Bottles decision makes total sense - they asked to not package their software long ago as they drown in bugs and supporting non predictable environment with unknown dependencies creates too many problems for them. I can understand that, development is hard as it is, unpredictability of environment multiplies this complexity.
They are maintainers and they do what they can to support the project, so removing donate button while packaging software done by others (who asked not to do it) is a childish move. Yes it’s FOSS, but morally it sounds a bit wrong.
We ask too much of mainters when it comes to soft skills, not all of us got these, but also not all of us are FOSS maintainers. And I think we should stop asking everyone to possess all skills in the world and react on someone’s rudeness as we are 5 (not saying we shouldn’t improve).
That, it’s a grown up person’s dream of a place to be. At least for lots of folks out there and me)
And overall it’s a good game to play slowly for months.
TBH I don’t have strong opinion where the boundaries of FOSS are. But I can understand their will to minimize effort where you see it fits as an engineer. If they think they lack of manpower to do something, it’s their vision as they put work towards it. We can help if we like, agree, disagree or ignore. Does not make sense to blame them though, that was the point of my first comment.