Well it caused me to cancel all of my subscriptions. It caused Sam Harris to cancel his account. It caused a lot of people to look for alternatives. I'm pretty sure this decision hurt Patreon's bottom line.
> Either their payment processors would cut them off, or they would face a larger and better organized boycott by those who prefer their current bias.
I don't think that's true, at least not with most of the Patreon bans. Nobody was organizing a boycott of Patreon for this, and Patreon's blog post didn't say they were pressured by payment processors. Another example: When Cloudflare stopped hosting The Daily Stormer, it was because Cloudflare's CEO didn't like them claiming that Cloudflare was a secret supporter of their racist ideology. And today Cloudflare seems to have no trouble with payment processors or boycotts despite hosting the Westboro Baptist Church's website.[1]
https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s...
Thread where a journalist finds evidence to that effect.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...
Transcript of a call from the Patreon censorship department with a creator.
I doubt that they did this for any reason other than using power against people they don’t like.
What makes you think that their bias is not good for them as a business? To me, it seems quite possible that were they to take the "principled" stance you advocate, they would soon find themselves facing much larger problems. Either their payment processors would cut them off, or they would face a larger and better organized boycott by those who prefer their current bias. Even if I'd prefer them to take a different stance for the long term benefit society, I don't see it helping them in the short term to do so.