It isn't to the people who get actions taken against their commentary that they deem restrictive, though. And while the average person will simply take the moderation action with a grain of salt, I've been in a situation before where I've had to recommend en-masse banning of people who originally had constructive comments that I largely agreed with.
You misunderstand, and perhaps I didn't describe the situation well enough, but you also seem incredibly bitter.
Imagine that you join a small subreddit focused on a hobby for which there's a lot of corporate-induced bullshit and not a whole lot of real information unless you've talked to actual experts in an informal setting (as in, company owners and manufacturers). It has maybe 400 members at the time, and most of those users come from other forums you recognize. Most of the users in that forum are past the novice phase for the most part, so their interest is a focus on deeper discussions that can further their own knowledge and expertise within that hobby.
As time goes on, more and more new people start posting, including many who are neophytes and can't tell their heads from their asses. They start to flood the forum with images of whatever it is they've just purchased and make the content that experienced members like to exchange harder and harder to find.
Meanwhile, the head mod is absent, he basically squatted on the subreddit, but reddit rules don't actually require one to maintain much activity in the sub. So the moderation team that actually has guidance and leadership are also a bunch of neophytes who begged for moderator status. They don't see anything wrong with the sheer lack of content in the subreddit because the sub is growing by thousands a month, but in the process all of the people who have actual knowledge of the topic are being driven off.
So now there's a crisis on multiple fronts: (1) the people who actually know what they're talking about are being driven off and not being replaced and so the sub is literally getting dumber on a daily basis, (2) you've got a core group of folks who actually used to be central to discussions who are now so incensed by moderator indifference that they're acting like idiots on the subreddit, and (3) the mods are paralyzed because they don't want to piss ANYBODY off.
That shit is dysfunctional. I agreed with the group of jerks that the subreddit needed to have a shift in what's allowable because it was nigh-impossible to find comment threads worth reading, but I also told them earlier that their best bet would be to create their own subreddit with their own rules (which is exactly what I did when they wanted to forbid talk about a specific topic... that sub has 30K or so readers now), and they wanted none of that. Since the mods were committed to growing the sub and not making the recommended changes, I told the mods after a while of watching these people behave like idiots that the best thing to do was to ban them. Didn't matter that I agreed with them in principle, the way they were going about trying to get the changes they wanted was belligerent.
