I disagree they sound hollow, public-pool is one of only a few mining pools that you can actually audit and run the code yourself. Secondly the code is proven to mine testnet blocks. Testnet is there specifically for the purpose of testing software for mainnet.

Here is a testnet block https://mempool.space/testnet/block/00000000000000019607d7e70369c2e5a07d9f56380e4e9f03b24d25b62f5fbc , you can see public-pool name in the coinbase.