From my understanding, with the slew of new users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, moderating comments and posts that were against Beehaw community rules (largely because of bigotry and harassment) became more or less impossible. While there has been an overall explosion in new accounts across the fediverse, almost all of their time was moderating users from those two instances. They were not able to find a compromise using the current mod tools, so went with the nuclear option while they figure out new solutions.