Absolutely, there's no shortage of reasons to hate on Unity or this merging, they have done so many things wrong it is infuriating but thinking that they would include malware as describe above forcibly, making any games made in Unity unpublishable on virtually all stores makes no sense.
Unity game dev will, willingly, include ads into their games, no need to sneakily force malware on users computer for that.
I get the fear, "unfounded" was perhaps the wrong word, most articles want to push the narrative this way, but despite their previous sketchy background, IronSource is one the leading mobile gaming ads company, they don't only make malware and clearly this merging is about "ads" and not installing malware.
Unity game dev will, willingly, include ads into their games, no need to sneakily force malware on users computer for that.
I get the fear, "unfounded" was perhaps the wrong word, most articles want to push the narrative this way, but despite their previous sketchy background, IronSource is one the leading mobile gaming ads company, they don't only make malware and clearly this merging is about "ads" and not installing malware.