This is why I don't get fussy about the retirement police. Words stop having meaning if we're not all working from a reasonable and agreed upon set of definitions.
If you stretch the definition of normal/average and if you accept "not an investment banker salary" as correct on a technicality, and if you assume the non-profit nature of the work wasn't leaned upon to create an impression of low wages and if you stretch the definition of retirement to include working from home full time and if you assume that their concept of average was warped by the affluence that surrounded them and if you assume that all the misleading publicity was completely out of their control, maybe you can accept the narrative as reasonable in good faith. But that's too many ifs for me.
When my nephew lied about sneaking out of bed to play video games at night, I beat the shit out of him gently reprimanded him for his lie. Even though the consequences of him lying to play more video games are almost nothing, I still want to impress upon him, and the world at large, that dishonesty is bad.
When people grow up though, the clever ones stop telling bold faced lies. They get much more skillful about their deceptions. I'm not going to hold them to a lower standard just because they got more clever though. Especially when the implications are much bigger than playing Mario Kart at 11:45.
I think the FW are good people. And I think they probably know that this is "wrong" on some level. And that results in them awkwardly talking out of both sides of their mouth. In the end, it's not great tragedy. I just get concerned when people start making excuses for dishonesty from the rich and powerful.