That didn’t really go under the radar

Yeah, but YPTB didn't stop it from happening. I do see your point that it eliminates and limits some of the harm, I definitely think it's good to have around.

I know about this one, but let’s be honest, that mod was quite aggressive as well

Yeah, but he wasn't guilty of the multitude of sins he was getting accused of. The persistent myth was that he would bait people into disagreements with him and then ban them for it. In all the time of me asking for examples of that, people leveled a torrent of abuse at him (most of which was factually objectively untrue), and they finally came up with one factual example: Someone was saying that certain types of female / transfemale athletes were "freaks" and needed to have special rules applied to them. Squid asked for some clarification, then banned the person once they clarified that that's what they were saying.

I do realize that he eventually had some kind of meltdown where he said some terrible things. I'm talking about his moderation before that happened, people had been harassing him for months before he actually did anything.

It's the same with JordanLund. He has a weirdly establishment-friendly way of moderating, which I certainly don't like, and so the accusation is ten miles past that: That he's a vile racist piece of shit zionist who will delete any criticism of Israel. That is cartoonishly false and incredibly easy to disprove. But people keep saying it. Why?

I mean, it's possible that it's just Lemmy being differently-abled sometimes, but it feels different to me than just the randomly undirected failures of comprehension that are more commonly on display. That's just my own judgement, not really anything factual, just kind of stating my opinion.