No real project will ever refuse comply with an obligation just on someone's topic on some forum. If their 25+ projects are real they can just explain the situation and get even more support being an open team. If they really have anything to show it is so easy to do to even improve their reputation. They should be transparent enough to collect investors money.
If they won't pay what they owe, this will just show that all suspicions were correct and not that they were offended by someone's topic.
Why would they? Is their a clause added that they need to explain themselves. No one was forced to participate in their bounty campaign and in the ICO! Risk is a prime factor when you either in invest or work for it as a bounty hunter. The problem starts when you do not have any factual evidence of scam and then you use the same forum to speculate a scam. We are in 2023, scam is a common, unless an concrete evidence is provide I think such topics doesn't make any sense.