I hate it when I'm left to guess the reasoning for administrative actions. It causes me to assume "just because we say so".
I'm an op for multiple things and always quote the specific portion when kicking or blocking or whatever. Helps when you number each part, but to quote my old mentor, "Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered, for just such an emergency." Ah foghorn!
The real reason is that freenode is desperate to stop the bleeding. And in the process, they just destroyed their reputation. They are now the network that tried to build a Berlin Wall to keep the users in.
If the free speech of official project channels is off the table, then the community has already been destroyed. How the result of these actions were not painfully obvious to Lee is beyond my comprehension.
Are you sure that wall is not to keep them out? /s
But as of 8 hours ago, the policies do say that if a primary channel closes access to users then freenode will close the #primary channel and forward to the ##topical channel.