I don’t know if you’re actually looking for an answer, but after having managed a small 1,000 person community I think the “spirt of the law” makes a lot of sense. You’ll get a few community members that are great, but then they want to be helpful and will start trying to micromanage other community members. They’ll see a rule like “Please keep discussions on topic for the channel”. And then if somebody asks a question about C++ in the programming channel (instead of the C++ channel) the “helpful” member will tell the person that they’re posting their question in the wrong channel.

As the manager/moderator of a community, I appreciate that this person is just trying to help. However, having somebody disregard your question and then tell you you’re doing stuff wrong can be a major turnoff to newcomers. In this specific case, it’s against the spirit of the rules because it’s a one off scenario. Now, this rule is helpful for the members that like to post memes everywhere, or talk about school or politics or religion in random channels. For these repeat offenders, I can point to the rule and politely ask them to move the discussions to a more appropriate channel. As with all laws in even real life, the rules are great for the black and white areas, but the majority of situations are gray. And it’s in those gray situations where we can operate within the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of the law.

Edit: also, to respond to your last statement. The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?