1. Chat moderation is *required*, unless you modify the vanilla game. There is no toggle for it on vanilla. You can choose to not enforce it for clients connecting to your server, but if they are a vanilla client they will sign chat regardless.
2. The initial wording of the rules that could result in a permanent ban, were incredibly loose & vague, allowing for bans for things such as swearing or alcohol/drugs, regardless of player age / legal status in their countries. This was something the community was able to change through pressure and the "outrage" you belittle.
3. > ...and the mindless recitation that it would lead to widespread abuse and false-positive bans. It didn't.
The reason it didn't was that since this community has a pretty tech-savvy sub-community of modders, we pulled apart that section of the code to examine it. And what we found was horrifying from a security standpoint.
Your message is signed by you (sig psuedocode in brackets):
"Want to play a round of spleef?"(JohnCrafter) "Sure"(jahsome)
Nothing, absolutely nothing in those initial few snapshots, ties your "Sure" to the context of a spleef match, or any proceeding chat. So with a burner account, one could change it to:
"The gays sure have ruined America, they must be purged."(BurnerAccount) "Sure"(jahsome)
It took several more snapshot releases before they started to actually implement a chain of context with signing, where one could prove what you replied to, or that a report had be adulterated. Again, psuedocode for how it's signed now after the "outrage":
"Anyone selling saddles?"(TexRanger) "Want to play a round of spleef?"(JohnCrafter+saddleMessage) "Sure"(jahsome+saddleMessage+spleefMessage)
4. The planned release schedule, and the "community consultation"
Something that seems missed to the history books, is that the development cycle for this was going to be one snapshot, one pre release, then release (In total, 2 weeks for community at large to see and respond before it's live to all)
That seems, rather short compared to most other previous releases that featured such a big feature? If it was adding emojis, sure. But a signature system, and full reporting framework? Turns out, from leaks, they had consulted a very, very small subset of the community under NDA on a private discord for about a year...
And it instead took 8 weeks to be launched. Due to the above mentioned issues with both the vagueness of planned rules, and the severe holes in the implementation as well as debate over the "stigmatization" being applied to unsigned chat messages.
One should also factor in that at this time, a prominent content creator within the community died. Which is never going to go well for "emotional stability" with young fans and likely contributed to some of the vitriol thrown about.
The Java community where much of this stemmed from, also has some trust issues with Mojang/Microsoft over previous debacles such as the ownership of Bukkit, and licencing around obfuscation mappings that were presented as a "here, use these to help with modding" but licenced very much more as a "look, but don't you dare touch".
And finally, Mojang had been, having issues shall we say, with their content release schedule up to that point (tl;dr the "Caves & Cliffs" update was understandably split in two during the start of the pandemic, but then further features from it slipped to the Wild update which even before chat reporting, had it's own drama surrounding "removed content" and reasons given by Mojang for it). Mojang had "used up" a lot of community goodwill before dropping a controversial feature in.
This in no way excuses the doxxing and personal attacks/threats levelled at the employees of Mojang. It was abhorrent and detracted from getting the real issues with this release/feature, resolved.
But at the same time, claiming it was all hysterics washes away alot of the problems with how it was implemented, and the sheer lack of consideration for the optics of adding a feature quickly with little to no public consultation, on a game that has been "public" in it's development for years.