I interviewed with Kite a number of years back. From that experience, I am entirely sure that they really had no malicious intent with any of this. That being said, I did tell them that IMHO they were severely underestimating the privacy concerns of developers. Looks about right.
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They had no malicious intents? Like in they had no intentions of hiring open-source maintainers, taking over their codebases and quietly injecting their product?
Point is, if we don't consider this sort of behaviour malicious then we can expect to see this more and more often.
Whether or not we consider this behavior to be malicious has no real bearing on whether they had malicious intent. I'm sure they think that adding Kite support to these plugins is great for everybody. But they have different priorities and opinions. I can easily accept that they had no malicious intent, but simply failed to realize that other people would feel differently about the changes they made. And that's definitely a problem, they should absolutely have realized that they were doing something people would not like. But when you're excited about your own product it can be hard to recognize that other people aren't.
Don't get me wrong, I think they're absolutely in the wrong here. I just also think it's important to understand motivations and reasoning instead of just attributing everything to malice. Otherwise you can't prevent this from happening again.