In my opinion no OS manages such a feat of making itself unknown, there are always some problems, and I think you agree with that in practice (it's more a matter of thresholds). So there is continuous improvement. The question is then whether or not the possible financial boost from the donations will improve the OS in such a way that the net benefit is positive with respect to the negative value of the donation notification (a utilitarian viewpoint, I guess). I would say it will be a net benefit, not least because the negative value of the notification is so small.

I recognized that name... he's working at Thunderbird!

A couple of months ago I had the same problem on Debian Unstable. Then I tried it on Fedora 40 and it worked flawlessly.

I assume that by "selfish" you mean taking up bandwidth from the Tor network, which is a valid concern. But using it as a daily driver for low-bandwidth tasks like reading text (and maybe a few compressed pictures here and there) is actually be beneficial to the Tor network, as it increases the size of the crowd, thereby making everyone more anonymous.