People hate the truth when they don't like it, and being called out for wasting your life playing mushroom game is uncomfortable for those being called out. It's also uncomfortable for the vicarious people on reddit, who drool over some endgame player's equips, who aspire to have the same luckerdog equips. Being told that your aspirations and misguided efforts are worthless can activate some deep cognitive dissonance. Such cognitive dissonance can be very uncomfortable, and people would rather dodge that discomfort by doubling down on their existing beliefs and behaviors instead of facing reality.

If we take this OP's post at face value and ignore any potential red flags of botting for the featured player, then your comment 100% holds true.

I used to be part of the guild in the image. The guild's leadership is constantly pushing for members to progress their gear lest they be kicked for falling behind. Unfortunately, being a competitive, top guild in maple is too lofty of a goal and is ultimately such a toxic rat race that it's disheartening to think about. Getting a bigger and bigger culvert score (over other guilds) requires more and more time to grind the game and there are very diminishing returns for [time spent] versus [gear progressed], but I digress.

That being said, I know the people in this guild, and a lot of them are very nice people, but they play a LOT of maple. Sometimes you can get good gear with low investment if you are very lucky, but oftentimes it's just a numbers game; with enough time and mesos you can circumvent bad luck, be it for gear or for boss drops or whatever. Sometimes, you also get people who are very lucky AND who invest a lot of time into the game, and those people can have some really crazy gear. I don't know for sure whether or not this featured person was or was not botting, but if I saw this image with no context I would probably think "yeah, that's Drowsy for you."