Sorry, I didn't mean to imply outright scams. However, most of the layer 1, and layer 2 projects that were launched in the last 5 years are essentially just that. You could call them legitimate, vaporware scams. Simply, a way to enrich the founders at the cost of retail. Sadly there was a time when being an advisor would provide a lot of legitimacy and those that choose to put their names with any major project could earn a lot of money depending on their reputation. I don't know how relevant such positions are still today, but I am sure that at least some of the Core developers have received their fair share of all kinds of offers.

Controversial is being too lenient, didn't he confirm that C.W. was satoshi? When he left, he should have stayed gone. Instead he tarnished his reputation. As far as Garzik is concerned, it is a similar scenario. Nobody doubts that the contributions were made early, but they all ruined themselves afterwards. Did you forget that they tried to pull of a contentious hard fork on us? Why do people obsess over historical contributions? Had it not been the three of them, it would have been 3 other people? Might as well been a chance selection by the universe's entropy. People come and go, many will come and go for malicious reasons. 

Even today, he is using his early contributions to damage Bitcoin: https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/06/09/the-end-of-bitcoin-maximalism. This is not someone who has Bitcoin's best interest at heart, and it is questionable if he ever did. Even if he did, people are easily corruptible and that is what happened to some of them. Others left for more normal reasons.