In practice, it is not strange at all.

The person you replied to tried to highlight why that particular framing a bad metric to highlight in an OSS project.

People respond better to something like:

this repo needs $500/mo to achieve X;

$1000/mo to achieve Y and;

$2000/mo to achieve Z. We have received $200 in funding for this month."

rather than the example given above:

"this repo receives $500 per month"

The first framing emphasizes your needs, the second framing emphasizes your current situation. The first is better because it gives any potential donor actionable information to decide whether you need a donation or not, and more importantly, how much impact their donation will make if they choose to donate.

A donor can make an out-sized impact on a project with a stretch goal of "$2000/mo to achieve Z" that has only received $200 in donor funds by providing the $1800 balance for instance.

Many people who get paid this way prefer the 1% case to the 25% case. It's much more stable. This means if you decide to stop, they only lose 1%, not 25%.

I mean, people are still going to enjoy getting more money, don't get me wrong. But they'd rather have 1000 people giving a dollar than two people giving 500.

Exactly your last. We could all take a page out of the Twitch streamers' books -- they do exactly like this: (a) set donation or subscription goals and (b) make it really cheap and (c) aim for volume.

I don't disagree. I'm sharing what I have been observing in the past.