It would be a lot better if it was a true donation, since Lemmy itself doesn’t have ads. The developer also has very minimal fees to cover, so it makes no sense to add ads ontop of a free service and have a steep price to remove it (yes, 20+ dollars for an app toconly remove ads is steep, look around at other app prices). This was not the case for Sync on Reddit, it was a lot cheaper.
It just seems unnecessarily greedy by the developer