So someone recently told me I should cut back on donations to open source projects.

Your being too nice, be more greedy??

spending 5 minutes writing up a comment only to accedently press the cancel button ): Lemmy devs should put a confirmation for canceling when it’s above a certain character limit or something.

Is zorin-os that good? I don’t really like its model of bundling a whole lot of free software together and then charging money for it.

Although you can just get the free version.

merging those contributions kinda becomes an actual need of users

When you say it becomes a need does this mean that not merging them would course the projects to fail? This means that if the option to merge the contribution didn’t exist in the first place (like non free software) the project would fail.

but I still think that letting companies just fuck off and do their own centralised thing separately from decentralised DIY-like development which, to my mind, is actual freedom, might help.

Actual freedom is taking away peoples rights to make things worse. If you want an example of what happens when actual freedom is available look at the free market.

I don’t think your argument makes sense logically. Are you saying that copyleft software is enshitififying because big companies are pushing too many (optional) contributions? Are you aware that software maintainers don’t have to merge the contributions these people are pushing? With MIT like software contributers don’t even have the option to merge or not to merge because these companies just make a proprietary fork.