In an open source project it works like this:
Stage 1: Initial contributors and founders have a rough aggressive tone that is slowly adopted by new people (who are generally polite when they come).
Stage 2: Old boy club realizes that their own impoliteness is being used back against them. They write a complex CoC with intersectionalism and all goodies that are hard to follow or understand for non-Americans.
Stage 3: Old boy club now ostensibly follows the rule set, while being ice cold, authoritarian and contemptuous on the mailing lists. People not in the clique are undermined and contradicted regularly.
Stage 4: People not in the clique explode when the pressure gets too much. We have a CoC "incident"!
Stage 5: Here is when the CoC comes in handy. The Stealing Council now solicits reports of all past "microaggressions" of the target. People sift through the mailing lists and compile a dossier, ignoring any context that individual messages might have been written in.
In short, the CoC allows for a pseudo "justice" system, where trials are held NKVD troika style, without hearing the target once. You have a document to point to! CoC complaints are also private, so complaints against the old boys can be brushed off and ignored. A public CoC complaint would be a CoC violation, so the old boys are fully protected!
In most cases the Stealing Council operates like a FISA court. Punishments are handed out privately and the targets are afraid to go public.