They aren’t offering citizenship. They’re offering residency. Nowhere in any of these visas is citizenship being offered, except in marketing literature from third parties.
A GV, anyone can get by showing up and handing over a bunch of cash, and that’s it. You don’t have to do anything or in most cases even take any meaningful risk. (Funds represent a bit of risk, but it’s professionally managed monetary risk that’s little different than buying shares in the stock market - hell, what is IMGA Acoes, and that’s ok. Completely and utterly passive risk.)
The difference between HQA and GV is that HQA is active. To my understanding, there is a corporation founded, in your name, that is funded, hires people, has to actually do something, pays significant taxes as a result, and puts capital at risk. (Ok sure there’s a requirement that you be highly qualified, but resume inflation can probably take care of that.)
Now sure, you can use one of these specialty firms to do all the setup work for you and put it all on auto-pilot. Of course then your business will most likely bleed money and die, all the while paying a ton of taxes. Your little business has to play by Portuguese law, which means you better care a bit about that. If you’re not careful your little company will find itself in a ton of debt, even - that you might well be on the hook for. There is genuine risk here and it really behooves you to give a damn and learn at least something about doing business in Portugal, or at least hire a professional manager and keep an eye on them. I suspect the specialty companies in this space provide the support services to let you not have to care THAT much (they say “as much or as little involvement as you want”) but it’s definitely non-zero.
This will winnow out a ton of people who really want a low-risk investment and an easy residence-to-passport, because it means your visa could potentially cost you multiple 6 figures and will cost you some attention.
Most importantly - this visa looks a LOT like the German investment visa program other than the magnitude of the investment involved. So Portugal can quite easily say “well you let Germany get away with this, why can’t we?” All arguments die there.