We clearly have very different concepts of what "prompting for donations for project X" actually means.

And frankly, the person you are complaining about thinks essentially the same thing, writing "But I figured that even if he spent $5k of the money on some unrelated computer, we could call that compensation for his past work, and it would still leave ~$25k to fulfill the promises he'd made in the fundraiser."

The point wasn't specifically a complaint about spending $5K on a computer but more establishing a pattern of a lack of transparency which the author thinks has an overall negative effect on community-funded, multi-author/community-run open source projects in Python.

Also, as described, it sounds like Smith - an author of the networking package which Reitz was planning to use - presumably knows what hardware needed to develop and test the network layer.