It means that, because the reddit version was open source, some completely different Dev was able to take it and rework it to work with lemmy

I doubt anyone who says this has donated to their Lemmy instance.

The truth is, humans try to justify their purchases. You didn’t want to pau for Sync, you would have happily used it for free.

You want to feel good for having paid for Sync.

The sad part is Sync will likely kill in way more money than the instances we run on.