But that’s what’s happening now? They broke their own rules - not merely removing comments, but also mass-banning from communities people have never commented in before, and then deleting the mod log entries afterwards. The former is not ideal but expected, the middle is… extremely excessive and warrants all of this right there alone, but the latter bumps the whole matter up significantly to be outright disingenuous, so that “that side” making its case is no longer expected to yield any results, given the not only manipulative but outright deceptive practices that have been (allegedly) proven.

I do worry about the use of a pejorative term though. In thinking about it more, I waffle back and forth between it should never be done, vs. whether someone can “earn” that badge not by holding a belief but by their actions?

We should definitely respect their contributions to the code and actually I would guess that they may legit believe that what they are doing (supporting China by suppression of alternate viewpoints, using any means necessary including ones that violate and abuse their own code of conduct) is right. But that does not make it so.