Kodi pirates did not destroy their reputation. Every semi-open platform has pirate users. Those that created piracy boxes and put the kodi logo right next to pirate services and legit services that addons enabled the piracy of probably contributed though. But most, if not all these boxes run kodi on top of Android, and their reputation hasn't been sullied from this.

I think Kodi could partially mitigate this issue by selling clean kodi boxes. I still don't know where I can buy one.