The difference here is that these people aren’t really running the show. They’re in charge of the main development branch, but that’s just back end code, and it is (or should be) reviewed by every admin when they use it to implement their instance. Development can be adopted or forked by other people, should politics get in the way.

It’s the morals of your own instance and its admin that are most important, these are the ones synonymous with reddit’s staff. In fact, it’s possible for the instance to put whatever code they want up. It can easily be non-standard to official lemmy, so you really are trusting them rather than the main lemmy devs.