I will expand a little on my post earlier today.
The number of people enjoying the outdoors seems to have grown exponentially in the last 5 years. To a point, this is a very much a good thing. However, it leads to ever increasing tension with land owners; parking problems, people leaving litter, abandoned tents, fires etc. That tension could easily have a knock on effect into SOTA. Indeed, we see it does with some summits. However, we can easily say “don’t worry, I’m only here for an hour and I’ll leave no trace” when on open access land. I would argue that SOTA should be very much aligned to promoting leave no trace.
If we look at examples of geocaching, people leaving trail cameras in woods, there are plenty of examples of individuals leaving things unattended, likely without land owner permission. Indeed, leaving RF gear on top of hills (with land owner permission) has been going on for a very long time. However, if more and more pop-up digipeaters get installed on hill tops, especially on National Trust land (the owner of G/LD-025) and it becomes associated with SOTA (e.g. someone google searches the call sign or image searches the mysterious box and either brings them to this forum), does it then have a knock on effect for SOTA rather than just for individuals? As has been stated earlier, land owners tend to default to not liking things like this. Does the SOTA reflector want to be seen to be promoting something not in the spirit of leave no trace?
This concludes that SOTA was probably not the problem, but a walker seemingly sent a letter of complaint to the RSGB. However, it is a good example of people (perhaps incorrectly) associating one thing with another.