I feel like this is the beginning of the end.
You alienate core users, you react to things in ways that violate your core principles to chase growth, you lose what made you valuable, and that's where the disenchantment and downward spiraling comes into play.
So fwiw, if you are looking for feedback here, I have ended up walking away from Lemmy (well, I maybe check the front page 1x every couple of months) in part because I think there's a population of antagonistic users who effectively game the rules by being antagonistic up to the limits of what's tolerated. My belief is that trolling reinvents itself every few years, and right now Lemmy is in a spot where it isn't catching up how modern trolling works.