whitelist (...) any site fully controlled by the developer of the game can be sourced

Sounds reasonable indeed.

IMO, F95’s stance of (...)

I have seen different approaches to piracy sites, especially on the many Discords I'm on, from "link away" to "don't even talk about it or get banned." On the Discord server for Come Home which I'm a mod of, we have made good experiences with "Mentioning F95 and similar sites is alright, but advertising it or posting links is not." Especially because it DOES have some value for devs with its dev forums, also mods and fan translations.

Just my $0.02 :)