I’d strongly prefer FF, but since they yoinked the Bypass Paywalls extension, I’ve been taking a look at Kiwi. Eventually once Manifest V3 goes though I’ll want to move to FF regardless, so I’m hesitant to consider Kiwi as a permanent solution though.

I suspect they do, in fact, understand the difference. And are intentionally conflating lemmy the platform with lemmy.ml the instance in order to dissuade people from using the platform, since they know that most people new to the platform wouldn’t understand the distinction.