That's basically what the article is saying, though, isn't it? The author wasn't deceived by an offer and didn't suffer a setback, they're just commenting on the fact that offers of help always carry some kind of cost. In this case the cost was compromising on their goals for the project. It goes in the same basket as any other unsolicited opinion on the internet, including this one.
The author wasn't deceived, in fact no one even tried to deceive him. Rather, a guy offering to help clearly communicated his intentions, so that the author was able to make an informed decision to decline that help.
From the very limited information presented, it's not clear to me why the author would judge this offer to be a selfish act, or why this anecdote would support his conclusion to "beware offers of help".
If the person who offered helped had technical chops to scale such project. Why they would approach existing project owner instead of building it themselves?
My explanation is they did not have what is needed like tech skills or they were after taking over existing users.
Idea of scaling something up as author noted usually comes with idea that money will eventually follow. Post author is not money driven so it might be that person offering was also different in that way.
Because said user was invested in this community, and reinventing the wheel further is sometimes not beneficial. Some people are really good at specialized tasks, but might not be good at other tasks. Really good backend engineer, not so great at frontend. Perhaps they don’t have the necessary marketing skills required for growth of their own. There are too many unknowns in this story, and it isn’t fair to paint the person harshly like that.
