To be fair, I have used the feature exactly once, but something didn't feel right afterwards. I dont want payment systems where I am doing something whose essence is not about getting paid. There are separate services where we can donate to developers if we'd like to, and developers who are seeking contributions can easily find and leverage those and link to them. Once the dominant open source hosting and sharing service financially inserts itself between its community of contributers, it becomes their financial interest to make more transactions happen between said contributers, and its easy to see GitHub becoming a payment system first instead of an open source community first. Private repos made sense; Sponsors sends chills down my spine about the future of GitHub and open source in general.