If I'm reading your summation correctly, someone made edited the CoC in an attempt to indict Schito ad-hoc, and that bad faith attempt was foiled because the community was able to see the timing of the change. Doesn't your version of events strongly imply that having the CoC on file is what made it even possible to see how transparent this attack was?

Maybe you believe that the CoC is what made this attack possible, but that's a far-from-self-evident line of thinking, because such bad faith attacks and power plays have long existed in projects with no code of conducts. I'm not for now getting into the argument of how a CoC may be overall beneficial, I am simply challenging u/aaron695 on his claim that CoCs have led to "lynching" and "are evil at its worst". I'm assuming that he, like many programmers, believes terminology have meaning, and that his choice of words reflects actual quantifiable and tangible wrongs.

I'm not even particularly bothered by aaron695's implicit comparison of what CoCs' allegedly inflct compared to the violence of real-life lynchings. But I think his use of the overdramatic term is a symptom of poor thinking here. Lynchings generally imply acts of horror arising from the absence of agreed-upon norms, or actual law. People who advocate for CoCs in good-faith, ostensibly do so because they believe a CoC can instill some trust (because actual laws aren't possible nor desirable) that behavior won't be punished/ignored for nebulous/arbitrary reasons.

The two examples given so far are examples in which:

1. The attempt to use the CoC in bad faith failed, as in your example with Schito.

2. Both the CoC's impact and its correctness are debatable, if we attempt to avoid taking or refuting Vegg's side. For starters, Vegg resigned. And if he hadn't, there's no indication the Node.js overseeing committee felt empowered to take action to remove him. And yet if the CoC did provide for that action -- again, such a rules-guided process (even if ultimately stupid) is still the antithesis of what a "lynching" entails.

I'm not trying to just be pedantic here, nor am I arguing that you and aaron694 are morally bankrupt bigots for your anti-CoC positions. I am arguing, though, that you have taken this stance without justifying evidence or logical reason. For an example of the latter, look at how you bring up the problem of "everybody else using the Contributor Covenant" that now includes the "Elia clause". Think about how absolutely absurd it would be if, in that argument, you replaced "Code of Conduct" with "[some library well-known to be broken/insecure]", and then used that line of reasoning to assert that open source software is "evil at its worst" or even, "kind of evil".

edit: correction, the user who brought up Rod Vagg was not aaron695, but another commenter.