Vitalik's organization is the Ethereum Foundation. The EEA is a separate organization founded later by other people.

(Personally though I don't see anything wrong with corporations using the technology.)

It's easy to paint conspiracy theories and it's hard to actually do the work. Vitalik is not in any way attached to the EEA - he's just some guy doing work because he thinks it will lead to good things. I think relative to most of the cryptosphere, or most of tech even the guy is practically a saint. Remember these are actual people behind the screens when you spew comments like these.

It's easy to gag opponents with "conspiracy theories" when you don't cut through the actual message. Academician Andrey Sakharov also did his work thinking it will lead to good things. Later in his life he had the gut to admit he was wrong. A researcher's good intentions and the actual use of his product when it falls into the hands of those who sponsored the work are orthogonal.

It was mainly "sponsored" by the ICO, i.e. crowd funded. I see your criticism as generally valid but the facts are upside down in that comment. Ethereum was neither founded nor supported by evil corporations, on the contrary for years the established mainstream lobbied against cryptocurrencies until one by one they flipped when they realized what smart contracts could be used for. Take someone like Warren Buffett, he's still doing it even now.

Ethereum and the crypto space are at a crossroads for sure. You have chains like Monero on the one side, many in the Ethereum community walking a tight rope trying to balance grassroots free software development with mass adoption, and on the opposite end of the spectrum you get stuff like Solana, the venture capital bro chain.

That organization doesn’t have anything to do with Ethereum’s decision making infrastructure.

I can make a “Linux Enterprise Alliance” with those companies and it wouldn’t necessarily have any influence on Linux or Linus.

True that, and I am pretty sure that humble, modest and good-intentioned guys working on a project that attracts the biggest sharks in the business can certainly fight against trillion dollar assets of the latter with their bare scientific rigor and austerity to defend their work from any possible overtake.

I hope everyone else also shares this belief, this is how we create belief systems that outlive their subjects and may go on to float freely among platonic solids and spherical cows in vacuum, forever.

As much as I would like to argue against it, things do degrade over time. It is very much unknown how much Linus' passing will change linux ecosystem as a whole ( and one could argue some of his original vision was distorted already ). It is a king problem. Even if you find one good king among all men, what are the odds whoever follows will be at least as good? Usually not great.

And ethereum is very much new. While I personally think it will exist for a little longer, because there is now real money behind it, I think you are right on that generic point ( if I understood your argument correctly ).