I tend to always give the underdog the benefit of the doubt in these cases.
Remember when a lady suffered third degree burns from coffee at a McDonalds drive through? Everybody made fun of her but she was right, she won in court, and McDonalds had to retrain staff and change how equipment was operated at every single location.
And she didn't even ask for the massive compensations she eventually got, she only asked McD to cover the medical expenses, as she had to spent a fair amount of time in a hospital because of the burned crotch she had.
Not unreasonable by a mile, but after that case, corporations have tried making pretty much all lawsuits against them seem completely ridiculous. I wonder why...
That said the dude in the photo does look guilty af.
That's how shitty they are, they wouldn't even pay the medical bills when they knew that their coffee was way too hot. They knew it was way too hot because their guidelines said to make it too hot to mask how bad it is.
However the reason they used such hot water to create coffee was that using 98C water to make coffee gives you more coffee from the same amount of coffee grounds than using the recommended 90C. Shittier coffee yes, and hotter, but more of it.
The actual reason they kept the coffee at that temperature (since it usually wasn't freshly brewed the brewing temperature doesn't matter) is that hotter coffee takes longer to drink, which means fewer refills (which used to be free when this happened).
The coffee was hot enough to cause life threatening burns and there were many cases of complaints and damages across the nation until they changed their policy. Now they serve coffee at a temperature humans can consume, and the lid is always tightly secured. She wasn't even suing for money, the court awarded her money she didn't ask for.