BitBay uses outdated protocols to make BTC payments and forces users to install insecure/proprietary wallet software. It's not good for bitcoin.
Completely agree with you, but it is possible to make payments to BitPay without installing their wallet by decoding their payment links and paying the address contained in the normal way. There are a variety of open source programs out there that will do this for you, such as
https://github.com/alexk111/DeBitpay. As of this recent blog post (
https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005701523), apparently BitPay invoices will now also display an amount and an address in the normal way, although I can't confirm this since I do not use any company which uses BitPay.
I looked into donating to Wikipedia the other day, not only is the donation page buried pretty deeply, deeply enough for many people to miss it, but BitPay also requires an email address, a full name, and a full address.
Wikipedia need to do better. Compare that with the Bitcoin donation page for the Human Rights Foundation -
https://hrf.org/donate-bitcoin/. Accepting payments via BTCPay, absolutely zero personal details asked for, and even has PayJoin support enabled.
The fee, however, is almost 16%! It's seems like it's a fixed fee ~$1.50 so not as bad when sending more but still
BitPay charges a "Network fee" to the user paying the invoice, which is variable depending on the mempool at the time, and also charges a "Processing fee" to the merchant, which is a fixed 1%.