nesbot/carbon is a popular date time library for php, included by default in Laravel, for example. It has amassed almost 700 million downloads on packagist.org.

Yesterday, I was looking through the repository, looking for documentation, when I noticed the sponsor section of their readme.

Almost all of the companies listed are betting/gambling sites, some of them specifically made to circumvent for example GamStop, Britain's system where gamblers can block themselves from gambling. One of the sponsor's images links to a TrustPilot profile that has been removed for breaking their guidelines.
Until just now I had not even noticed the "show more" button. I found at least another one with a deleted TrustPilot profile. There's so many more.

I raised an issue about this on their repository, but it just got deleted, not closed.

What the hell is going on here? Why are all these shady companies sponsoring this project? Is the one circumventing GamStop even legal?