As far as I'm aware this wasn't even perceived as a problem until a 1 off situation. That 1 off situation being highly controversial in this community.

You'd be wrong there, a similar situation with the same user (to my knowledge) being involved that happened at the start of hexbear/chapo.chat and a bunch of users got banned, including the user people donated/gave the money to. It's been ongoing since the chapotraphouse subreddit days.