“D&D 5e, the game that requires spending at least $60 on and probably way more, which I personally pay a subscription to the corporation for in addition to the books and encourage other people to do the same, is a game that belongs to its players. The company isn’t even a part of it!”

Can I start killing people now

"D&D belongs to its players" is pure cope from people who understand that WotC is not a good company but who are afraid of stepping outside of their walled garden, so instead they come up with various excuses that ignore economic realities (there are, sadly, very few ways to play D&D 5e without it feeding somehow into WotC's margins) or at worst start doing mental gymnastics to prove that actually playing D&D 5e in a transformative way is really showing it to WotC (to paraphrase @sirobvious, "playing D&D wrong as activism").

And like I understand where it comes from. These people are after community and D&D has a large community. Branching out from D&D means leaving that large community and all the bad memes it produces behind. But it's completely divorced from reality to pretend that the multi-million dollar company that created the game that said community is built around has nothing to do with said company or that said community doesn't actively support said company.

So, yeah, here's your sword soldier, start killing.