This was way worse during Covid , I know, even though before Covid it was already very bad. People were banned just for asking questions, merely for dissenting from the narrative, which was constantly changing, like about masks.
The issue that moderators face is the "what is the relative worth of this topic in this subreddit compared to the additional (personal) cost of moderating it?"
For many hot topic items no matter how innocuous or relevant to the subreddit, unless there is a large and active moderator team that can handle the fallout and apply appropriate anti-flame measures, the course that is easiest to take is "just delete it as soon as it starts."
The moderation tools are blunt. Remove and approve. Shadow bans aren't things that can be done easily by mods (possible, but takes a fair bit of manual curation and getting into the automod setup). Delayed visibility can't be done (I'd love to have a "any reply to a comment that has a significant number of votes in that post is delayed by 15 minutes").
If there's a post that is "this will take me 1 minute to delete now" or "this will take me 1 hour to clean up later" - that 1 minute to delete now will likely win every time.
Note that the alternative isn't "but you can just leave it up and users will behave" - it is "this sub will become unmoderated, full of spam, and eventually closed down." If the mod is at all interested in the topic, that's not a desirable state.
