I think the underlying issue with the post that you have linked to is that it states motivations of people and organizations as fact when in reality they are the opinion of the author.

I don't include a donate link in my plugins. And I don't think that making the donate button more prominent is going to increase donations. The general public perception of open source/GPL software available in public repositories is that it is free. That's why the donation rate is low.

Thanks for a great discussion post.