Agreed, that's part of my problem with generalist instances. They're so broad that they serve multiple communities with differing expectations, and it forces admins to take sides.
Fair, but this isn't just free money for grocery stores -- it's no-strings-attached cash that will be spent where people most need it. Which, yes, will be groceries for a lot of people.
I don't like the handling of grocery gouging, but this specific rebate is not the problem.
I think part of the issue is that all the different Lemmy and kbin instances are trying to be Reddit themselves. By which I mean there are a bunch of instances with no focus. They're all "kitchen sink" instances, each with their own Politics, Tech, Cats, etc.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, fedia.io. All of them are generic reddit alternatives, but the real reddit alternative is the amalgamation of subscriptions from multiple more focused instances.
Startrek.website is a great example of the opposite: it's an instance focused on one topic, where some people will want to sign up as a user and others will want to just subscribe to one of their three (!) boards from their own instance. They don't need their own Politics topic, users on the site that care about it will subscribe to a politics topic from another instance. The startrek admins and mods only have to care about their one focus.
My ideal fediverse feed would be pulling individual topics from a few dozen more focused instances instead of one generalist instance. I think that's what's going to end up happening.