> grown adult men

On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog. I won’t look for original threads, but in general assumptions about posters age and gender are just that - assumptions. If they were female posters, would you feel differently??

> Telling on themselves, perhaps?

Get rid of this sentence. By itself it will be the cause of disengagement and downvotes.

> this is a hill people will die on.

Getting an account banned in no way equates to death. Oh no, lost my karma!

I think I remember that thread. IIRC, it went something very, very roughly like this:

  Future banned user: It weirds me out a bit how young the mascot looks. I've never been comfortable with cutesy, underage-looking mascots.
  
  The dogpile: How dare you insinuate that the dev a pedophile? Don't you know how anti-trans that dogwhistle is?

I'll also note that you chipped in with

> It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman.

when -AFAICT- noone in this subthread expressed anything more heated than "dislike of kawaii". But perhaps you were speaking more generally, and weren't inspired by any conversation that happened in this subthread.