It's a shame you are being downvoted because you are absolutely right. The myth that has been built up around this incident is ridiculous. It was essentially the same joke as those Chrome plugins that change "feminist" to "skeleton".

/u/spez's main mistake was pushing it as an actual change to the comments database. If he'd forced a CSS change or whatever this overblown censorship/deception narrative would never have arisen.

"Fuck /u/spez" is not libel, and is not even particularly offensive. And yes, he "owned up", but without apologizing.

EDIT: So actually on https://www.reddit.com/comments/5frg1n he did actually say that he was sorry and he wouldn't do it again. That's interesting, because I have a very strong memory of that not being the case. Weird. Either there was an initial acknowledgement that didn't have any sort of apology, or I missed something. I still stand by my minimization of the thing to which he reacted.

The entire subreddit was calling him a paedophile, this is actually mentioned in the post this thread is about, so I'm not sure how you could have missed it -https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...

It seems a bit like your feelings on this issue are stronger than your recollection.

and how did they libel him?