some are; some aren’t
some funding companies state openly that they are
some give successful customers a choice of brokerage at which the funded accounts are held and invite communication directly between the customer and brokerage
some give successful customers a choice between live (genuine, real-money, funded) or “live-sim” (demo) accounts
it’s sometimes extremely easy to tell whether or not the account is genuinely funded or demo (for example, by temporarily opening a trade order far from the price to see whether or not it shows up in the exchange’s DOM - that’s objective and reliable and simply factual)
there are crooked/scammy companies (many of them!) and honest/ethical ones (a few)
just as with everything else
in general, of course, the funding companies offering futures accounts are far more honest than the spot forex ones (“surprise surprise” 
) as they have to be, since that’s a completely transparent market in which everything’s independently verifiable, the “brokers” actually are brokers and can’t hold the other sides of customers’ trades, and so on
the important, helpful things, when discussing the whole murky subject, are to distinguish between fact and opinion, between reality and prejudice, between objectivity and ignorance