Every political group has bad faith actors who care more about winning the argument than the truth. And worse faith actors who are just there to trash talk people. Just look at the red button / blue button argument (where the vitriol in the debate would only make sense if the buttons were real, or if people like being jerks).

Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them? Or say it should just be treated as a more utilitarian "be nice" convention for the mailing list (obviously it depends who is calling the shots, but that is true in any project).

Why anyone gave CoCs and their adherents the time of day over the past decade will always be a mystery to me. We should have pointed, laughed, and banned them. Instead, large projects and corporations dove headfirst into CoCs and grievance politics, openly inviting woke/DEI/leftist entryists in. Looking back I think it was a COVID and ZIRP fever dream. The reversal upon Trump's second presidency goes to show how performative it was.