They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.

Nope, not even the tiniest bit. We know how vital lemmy is, and want to secure its long-term future by being entirely sustained by donations. We never at any point reached that goal, and given that nutomic had a new baby, this is more important now than ever.

hemorrhaging donation money

I have no idea what this means. We're paying our daily living expenses so we can comfortably work on lemmy without having to find other work. The costs are food and rent.

this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever.

I'd love to be able to grow our co-op, and add more developers! Donations make that possible too, especially if they exceed 2 average dev salaries (we're a long way off from that).

What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?

It's clear you've never tried, because we've never and would never reject code contributers for petty reasons like "not fitting in". If ppl don't want to work with communists, that's on them. Personally I'd never reject someone for their ideology, especially if what they're doing is FOSS, which serves the common good.

I would like to see this platform expand beyond them,

We don't stop people from forking lemmy and never would, that's entirely their right.