I find that trashing on all of Lemmy development and lemmy.ml from nutomic's one questionable stance to be a little idiotic, but that's just my opinion. Those things are the work of more than just one person. Dessalines is a heavy lifter in moderation and development, and they're pretty decent. Various contributors have provided code/features, translations, apps and interfaces to Lemmy. Moderators of all server types have their own opinions on stuff.

But to an extent we all have to put that aside, because face it, perfectly sanitized opinions have nothing to do with code quality. We all have a couple shitty opinions, but what makes someone a decent human being and not a bigot is recognizing where their actions and opinions cause harm unto others and try to minimize that. This harm reduction can include changing actions and opinions, but it can also be keeping harmful actions and opinions away from people it would harm. This is where Ada probably sees banning nutomic from the instance as sufficient rather than all of .ml

Yeah, the whole China/Russia can do no wrong sort of thing is a pervasive problem on Lemmy.ml, but likewise they keep moderation of that to within the confines of their instance. The running costs of a server are virtually nothing compared to cost of working full-time to maintain software, so most donations don't really go to hosting the .ml server itself but rather to development. I don't personally agree with the .ml admins on many things, but I'll defend them for allowing others to run online communities how they want in return for letting every one of us do the same. I've likewise defended Ada's decisions on how they want to root out transphobia from their server, that's their choice, and so far it seems to have served Blahaj users well.