What exactly is the difference? It's still just money changing hands at the end of the day, and we will never be privy to complete financial details of a games development. This always just feels like people just begging companies to tell them what they want to hear to somehow feel better about themselves, like the whole "don't announce DLC before a game comes out so that I can pretend it wasn't in development until after release" thing.
The difference is in one case the game would not exist at all without the funding, and in another case the game was always going to exist and someone paid to prevent other people from getting it.
I mean it's a pretty significant difference and absolutely vital in determining whether anyone should be annoyed. It's like how Bayonetta 2 wouldn't have existed without Nintendo's help, yet people wanted to cry about it.