You might have skipped over this part of the article:

> “Based on guidance from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, our reserve amounts to one year of operating budget,” said Samantha Lien, a spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation. “If there were circumstances that affected our ability to raise those funds during that period, we could end up in an urgent situation — the reserve is a safety net to protect Wikipedia against such a possibility.”

It's prudent for any non-profit to have a suitable reserve in case of emergencies. The WMF was not financially stable and only recently has started moving towards that direction with its endowment. I agree that the banners were a bit too alarmist in tone, but they weren't that far from the truth and I'd rather Wikipedia overcommits rather than under to save face but instead be financially unstable.

That "prudent reserve" argument is really a red herring the WMF loves to employ, because as long as you find ways to inflate your annual spending you can justify any reserve amount as "necessary".

And that's exactly what's happened. Today WMF spend twenty times what they used to spend ten years ago, when Wikipedia was already a top-10 website.

So naturally, the reserve they say is necessary today ($100 million) is twenty times the reserve they said was necessary ten years ago ($5 million). If that pattern continues, then in another ten years they will say that they need a reserve of $2 billion. Twenty years from now it will be $40 billion. You get my drift.

I wouldn't mind if readers and contributors saw palpable value from that spending, but is Wikipedia's software really 20 times more useful for the reader and contributor than it was ten years ago? I don't think so.