In my opinion this is actually better than the CoC. The only thing "missing" is the definition of which qualities you shouldn't discriminate against. But that's now generalized into "groups of people".

I still can't discriminate against people based on any qualification. Hell, I technically can't discriminate against "pineapple on pizza eaters".

Need some context here: is this what we removed, something that's already somewhere else, a proposed replacement, or something else?

Unless you provide the exact text you were banned for, I'll be having my doubts.

Was this during the sync thing?

To be honest as a mod or admin I would personally get sick of reading the same things over and over again, with sync fans attacking staunch FOSSers and staunch FOSSers attacking sync fans. It only served to get both sides upset for literally no reason, and fracture the community even more.

Their inboxes would have also likely been flooded out to death during that time with both sides reporting each other over petty remarks

Doesn't make it right, however I can see why it happened. Probably another reason behind the "dont report something unless its against the terms" rule.

This is exactly what I experienced when I was part of their top moderator and ban discussion discord channels. They would regularly ban people for little to no reason and then laugh about it and then realize they need to come up with reasons after the fact. This is also how they deal with defederation. They had defederated an instance more than once prior to having any concrete reasons to do so. They operate on gut feeling and disregard their own rules and ToS on the regular.

Not even Reddit is so unprofessional.

Even after moving here FROM Reddit, I can't stand the Redditors here

Lol that's a very subtle strikethrough