I was wondering when that repo showed up and all of a sudden there were 50k downloads of the windows version if this might happen.

The coderberg fork was linked directly to the main strawberry page where the source code is and it's pretty obvious the downloads were just the same as any subscriber executables.

I highly doubt the story that the person behind the fork was given binaries for testing. My guess is it was just a subscriber sharing their downloaded executables.

The whole malware argument the creator made is fear mongering.

Its odd he charges $7/month for subscribers on Patreon but its only $5 if you pay via Kofi.