It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place.
While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community.
A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole."
The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes).
Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.