Also, merch for organizations providing free shit is a way to financially contribute and to get the word out about the project. Especially something like home assistant where most people have never heard of it, and many may think it's too hard, you can get the word out and maybe even get some people interested in getting free from corpo ecosystems.

Do any sell key caps to replace the windows key on keyboards?

Why so negative?

It's clear that the Nabu Casa Inc. people, who also happen to be the Home Assistant project leaders, are focussed on making money over making well engineered software.

For example, Home Assistant's settings page includes an entry for Nabu Casa Inc.'s cloud services product as the first entry in the list and there's no option to switch it off.

Home Assistant is engineered in such a way as to make it difficult to install on operating systems that aren't under control of Nabu Casa Inc., like Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Container. If Home Assistant were engineered well, it would be simple to take individual Home Assistant packages and build and install them on any distribution, as has been customary in the free software community for decades. As far as I know, there's no reason Home Assistant must be an operating system rather than simply individual packages. See https://feddit.uk/post/17543373 and especially https://feddit.uk/post/17543373/12207671 .

Bands also makes merch to increase their income, should we hate on them as well?

If a band makes selling merch their purpose, over and above making decent music, then I would likewise scorn them.