Those aren’t rumors. The Lemmy repo is quite open about this. Lemmy’s devs are part of the Tankie problem here.
Honestly, Kbin and Mbin are looking very attractive, not being run by extremists. Lemmy, as a product, is dragged down by the Tankies that make it - just as Pleroma (a Mastodon alternative) is dragged down by the Neo-Nazis that make it.
Kbin is dead, Mbin is good but different to Lemmy. Also see PieFed and Sublinks.
The wonderful thing about federated services is that you can have fun with all the users on Lemmy and see all the content but not have to actually use the Lemmy software. You can even follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon and interact with posts from there (just in a Mastodon way).
So they dont deserve a single penny, I’d rather watch this platform burn to the ground.