As others have said, welcome to lemmy.

Dessalines is one of the lead devs, admin of the flagship instance lemmy.ml (and mod of many of its comms as you’ve seen). He is known to be incredibly heavy handed in his admin/moderation choices.

As far as using communities goes, just steer clear of .ml comms if it’s a problem for you. Plenty of equivalent comms on other instances.

And if you don’t like using software made by someone like that, piefed is interoperable. Made by a user that goes by rimu.

The takeaway is that this isn’t unusual or concerning behavior for dessalines.