If that is indeed what got funded, those changes appear to be extremely minimal and benign and I can understand why people would have an issue with funding this.
I don't know much about this codebase and I am probably one of the dumber people on this site (that's ok, I'm happy and eat well), but take a closer look at some of these commits:
Now to be fair I've never been paid 270k by coinbase so presumably these guys are a lot smarter than me, but I'm still really confused why they got funded.
Your mistake, the right way to do this is to optimize 100% for the leetcode interview and 0% for how to do a job.
You get hired and undercontribute for nine months before putting in notice after you win another interview, which is easier this time because you won one before and got the pedigree.
There is a whole generation of people who write solutions to assignments and have no idea how to create software. These commits are what happens when they don’t receive a prompt requiring a from-scratch implementation of a topological sort.
That's on the companies for structuring their interviews like that. Actual technological competence is not measured, only skill in algorithms and data structures, 75% irrelevant for the job..
Well, I looked through the work and it's mostly random config/frontend changes. I don't see a lot of meaningful work done? Whether LoC matters or not, it doesn't change that pretty much nothing was changed.
Let's take it to the extreme - how much would you fund a "tech startup" that doesn't have any of its own code at all, but rather just has its founder manually press buttons on a third-party tool's GUI?
Note that I'm not asking whether it's ethical, or even if the service is worth it to a customer (maybe the founder really is good at pressing the right button at the right time) - but would you as a founder fund it, knowing that there's pretty much no barrier-to-entry whatsoever?
Here are the commits from the founders:
* https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commits?author=n... (71 commits)
* https://github.com/trypear/pearai-submodule/commits?author=F... (21 commits)
This is what got funded... I leave it to folks to decide if the changes to date are meaningful.