As an OG pirate in my teens and a what elite in my twenties I’ve been spending on average about £50 a month on bandcamp for pretty much all of my thirties.
I do through my purchases and my general encouragement of traffic to the site, if I wasn't a broke graduate student and had the funds to invest in them, without a doubt in my mind I would.
However, even if I am unable to invest in them I see nothing wrong about my expressing discomfort over someone else buying them. I have seen nothing as well that they needed cash to continue operations.
Indians and Asians are some of the most racist people I have worked with as a trans. They are more concerned about what your genitals are than the work you can do. They are especially racist to those who identify as black, latinx, and womxn.
I think you're right in pointing out this shouldn't be done without respect to the users. What we're seeing is that many users who interact with our widgets actually appreciate this - they would recommend the app they're using and tell us they recommended the app because they felt important and their opinions valued. You're 100% right that some folks might not want to interact with this and we've optimized our UX such that users who don't want to interact with this, don't need to at all. I wrote detailed answers to why we're different in the original post, so I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on what you think on these points! :)