Hilariously a year after saying they would never remove the slur filter, they did just that in 0.14 (https://lemmy.ml/post/89740). I'm not sure if that's a good look or not.
Good software is continuously improved. Criticizing the authors for an arguably wrong design decision they've corrected years ago is vengeful and petty. It's no different than the viral rumors spread by the Mastodon thread TFA mentions. This is abhorrent behavior that has no place in the open source community.