No you're right, there's not going to be a mass exodus because of one mod. However if GitHub became known as the 8chan of git where anything goes, that would likely cause a slow decline that would be difficult to turn around. The way you prevent that is by drawing a line and saying that if someone crosses that line they're gone. I guess they've deemed this user to have crossed the line.

Whenever I see "virtue signalling" or "free speech" mentioned regarding tech companies like GitHub, Facebook, Twitter etc it's usually someone pretending they don't understand how companies work (and ironically doing their own little form of virtue signalling). Companies want to make money. You don't make money by pissing off the population. GitHub seem to have decided that allowing a user they've deemed as questionable is going to piss off more people than kicking that user off. If you don't like it and want to exercise your freedom of speech and/or signal that you're more virtuous than the rest of us then you are welcome to self-host or try out GitLab, BitBucket, sr.ht or CodeBerg.

Right but proper reaction to that is sending a message of "hey this repo breaks TOS because X Y and Z". You get the author chance to explain (if it is genuine misunderstanding, which will happen just due to culture differences and some moderators being, well, utterly incompetent) or fix their attitude, or remove their stuff.

And in case of someone discussing it, like here, there is no need to guess and dig if the reason is given plainly by the moderator and points directly to the offense. Instead of speculation you get people look at it and just go "oh, yeah, that's fair" and move on.

Yeetus deletus of everything, including unrelated things, because you broke TOS point which we don't even tell you how did you break it (which is pretty fucking common with any big tech, regardless of the reason, even if reason is just "triggered some heuristics in our system") is not okay.