It should be noted that toolforge tools are run by volunteers, and are subject to a different privacy policy than the main wikimedia sites (that said, they are not allowed to do shady things).
You should only need an account on wikipedia not toolforge. Blame all the people who keep uploading pirated movies.
"Vetted" is a bit of an exageration (its pretty easy to get an account. Sure technically there is a process, but its an easy one).
Basically you can't openly be evil, and if someone discovers that somebody is being evil they get kicked out. Also i think there is a proxy so you can't easily collect ip addresses.
So its a step above some random website, but ultimately its closer to a third party site then it is to being real wikipedia.
Given you are all on hackernews which is basically a link aggregator for random websites, there is really no reason for this to give anyone pause.
All the other reasons like spam notwithstanding, without at least some persistent user ID, how would image licensing work? You'd only be able to have works that can be shared and modified freely without attribution.
Wikimedia is surprisingly lenient on accounts, you don't even need to give an email to get a username.
Yeah, I found the login requirement very confusing, and I definitely wasn't about to grant high-volume editing permission to an app I'd never heard of (WikiShootMe is the URL, but it's not mentioned on the page or in the HN article title, and HN clips off the subdomain).
I needed to go hunt down the documentation (available under the hamburger menu), which makes it clearer (eventually) that authorizing is only required if you want to upload pictures through the WikiShootMe app - so you could skip authorizing and upload through Wikidata/Wikimedia Commons instead.
But I feel like requiring a login makes it a nope.