"So what if they are a VC-backed company?"

Why do they need to ask for money from the public if they are VC-backed?

Assuming that the Deno Land Inc. company would benefit from protection from Oracle's trademark

As a member of the public I see no "material gains" from "freeing Javascript from Oracle"

But I may be biased. I do not use Javascript and avoid others' use of it as best I can. I use a different object-oriented, garbage-collected scripting language with C-like syntax that is faster than JS, and faster than Lua (not LuaJIT)

Why are you being cryptic about it?