At the time I joined Lemmy, lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad were basically the only places in town.
Things have changed nowadays. But I'm still very wary of lemmy.ml, and as long as the devs are in charge of that instance I will keep warning people about it.
I trust that they won't let their political views get in the way of maintaining Lemmy itself, but it's important that people have context instead of stumbling into it themselves.