What exactly do you believe that this CoC addresses by the way? I am generally unconvinced that a CoC does anything positive at all, but what is it that you believe that it does?
The way a CoC would work, I think, is hard to quantify.
Sure, it may mean that some folks rage-quit on principle, some will continue bad conduct and get themselves kicked out, some will subvert the intent of it one way or another.
But if a CoC is "successful", it will mean that gradually you'll start to see folks who were previously under-represented start to contribute. You'll see more diversity and less fear and loathing. Is that a worthy goal? Yes, for many.
"Worthy Goal" Has that worked anywhere in practice? Who is underrepresented right now and why? Do we know?
The type of diversity archived by a CoC like this is litteraly skin deep anyways and might cost you diversity of thought. We already see "wrong" think beeing excluded.
It is also suspicious to me how this change was seemingly not discussed in any way prior and that it was a very sudden change for him.
If the leadership interpreting those rules are reasonable then they wouldn't need these rules in the first place, if they are not reasonable then the rules are useless.
Especially since CoC are most often applied in a very Hypocritical way. The CoC states "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences" which is however only true if you have one of the approved viewpoints. Which we are seeing right now with the Linux CoC. Of course no one does anything about all the slanderous accusations that get made to oust someone with the CoC even though those accusations themselves are violating the CoC.
It is also especially worrisome that these pushes for CoC or language policing come mostly from the outside and try to dictate the rules you need to follow and the rules that you need to make people in your project follow.