I used to work at BigTech in a role where I spent a lot of time reviewing new open source projects. It was always a fun game to guess which single person in which department tried out a piece of software that caused our logo to end up on the "as used by..." description on the tiniest of projects.
Fair haha. I'm no trademark lawyer, but I have to assume there's some wiggle room when you're not actively stealing their trademark and just referencing it... but still, the combined value of endorsements from Google/Nvidia/Amazon/ByteDance/Tencent/Alibaba/SalesForce/IBM etc has to be worth... a lot. That "not company endorsements" is rather load-bearing. I don't think I've seen anyone just say that, so maybe they're being a bit less bold haha.
You might as well say Herdr runs on 3 billion devices, go all in! 16 billion devices! Every human on earth installed Herdr twice! (source: study amongst users of herdr, n=5)
I get your point completely. I was (naively, I suppose) pretty surprised when I realized how low most people's threshold is to add a logo and claim a client/brand.
I've seen VCs very much encourage this (and shadier) behavior. There's a line between hustling / being an entrepreneur and actively trying to mislead people... clearly we don't all see that line being in the same place (:
edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to make such a broad statement about VCs. I'm sure plenty of people do this on their own