Why so much emphasis on rules? If someone is clearly doing something wrong, you don't need a rule violation. If someone is not clearly doing something wrong, then don't ban them. This way, there is no possibility for rules lawyering.
The angst comes from the grey area between “do nothing” and “ban forever”. How does one strike a balance between the health of the overall community against the need of the individual to be able to take risks and make mistakes? A simple binary doesn’t cut it.
E.g. I got banned from Stack Overflow for deleting my own comments in protest of their new policies, which is explicitly allowed by the rules, but hinders their new project of selling site dumps to AI companies, therefore it merits punishment, regardless of what the rules say. And it's not unique to SO - every community is like this - so we should probably acknowledge it.