May or may not be true - that's just the feel I'm getting.
Second, what SourceForge did was worse than your examples. They modified trusted applications to add essentially a malware payload. This is worse than Facebook collecting too much data and being shady with it. SourceForge was installing spyware on machines without permission. This betrayed the trust of both users and publishers and even damaged users’ trust in those publishers.
The only one of your examples that is comparable is Lenovo’s Superfish mess, and in that case they only betrayed users, not publishers. Not that it actually makes it better, but it changes the impact to Lenovo.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee.
Source: I was hosted on SourceForge at the time and approached about participating in DevShare. I researched it extensively and saved copies of the stub installers for things like GIMP as part of that research.
In those years, most of the developers who chose to host their projects on Sourceforge strongly believed in this ideology. GPLv2 was the most popular open source license then. Given all this, it makes sense that those early users who held freedom of software to be sacred were very pissed when Sourceforge decided to bundle closed source adware into the binaries of these open source projects without the explicit permission of these open source developers.
Times have changed a lot since then. GPLv2/v3 license is now considered too restrictive and the MIT license is more popular. Most of the tech community understands the concept of open source more or less. The movement in favor of software freedom has begun to lose momentum. Open source software makes a lot of business sense, so we don't need the push for open source software anymore like we used to in the early 2000s.
Even some people like me who once would run nothing but completely free operating system with free tools have now begun to use proprietary drivers because as we have grown older, got busy, with kids and family, the time spent tinkering with open source drivers is not worth it, we would rather use something that just works. When we use Microsoft and Facebook we know what we are getting into and most of us are more or less okay with it. It's different times and different kinds of users. That explains why Microsoft and Facebook do not get penalized as heavily as Sourceforge did. Sourceforge violated something that was held sacred during those times. Microsoft and Facebook have no notion of sacred-anything.