Comcast provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any other customer's router. (Roughly) a mesh network provides its wifi by allowing you to connect to any of the other nodes within the mesh.

What's your point? Is the money/infrastructure less legitimate because it was donated? Is the public wifi down at the library fundamentally worse because its cost wasn't bundled into the price of a coffee?

Hardware is hardware. If it works, who cares where it came from?