I agree with you, the dev team for Lemmy are hard line ideologues and it has hurt their original stated mission to take online communities out of the hands of corporations. As you noted, all that slur filter stuff was removed from the codebase some time ago, they've walked it back a bit, though they're still the same people of course. The software works.

If you're interested in a different federating link aggregator there's also lotide https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/ which looks promising as well, and littr.me/littr.go/brutalinks https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/ which is single community oriented like HN.