If the maintainers are open about their use of it and attribute the code made in this fashion properly, there’s far less of a problem. If people don’t like it they can stop using the project and/or fork it to only have human-made code in their version. That’s their choice in FOSS. The jerk reaction and obfuscation makes it far bigger of a problem than this should have been. I don’t trust people when they react to criticism in this fashion. They would have done better just stating the topic was off limits before they lost their cool.