The purges were absolutely necessary for hexbear to provide a safe space for marginalized people.

Hedging new users (particularly the troll repeat offenders) in order to curb the worst impulses of Reddit Liberals was necessary. There were a number of pitches and proposals for how to do that, but none of them manifested. So it was left to the whims of any particular admin at any particular moment, leading to users getting perma-banned, appealed, reinstated, and then banned again.

Then you’d see people picked off for random heated arguments in the comments that had nothing to do with marginalized people. Being on the wrong side of DSA on any given day, liking/disliking a particular politician (be it Warren or Sanders or Jill Stein or Claudia De la Cruz), or even just getting into arguments over the benefits of electoralism or entryism generally speaking got people zapped. Any kind of ill-informed take on Israel/Palestine was bannable. Fedjacketing was common-place. And the degree to which the Report button was used in place of the (disabled) downvote button could not be overstated.

This created a ton of work on admins/mods. And the workload, combined with the development/maintenance needs on the site, ultimately killed activity in the development channel.

I thought mandatory pronouns were dumb, but I was instantly proven wrong by the number of rabid transphobes who immediately identified themselves.

It wasn’t the rabid transphobes who did the site in. Go back through the modlogs and you’ll discover how many accounts were removed entirely because a given mod used the ban action as a way to win an argument on something utterly benign.