Keeping the experience bearable BY gatekeeping. That is the point, gatekeeping is not inherently a bad thing. It's a required thing in many circles.
To me, it amounts more to disapproving showing up to a handmade sweater community and showing off your machine made sweaters, or maybe a machine made sweater you added a handful of stitches too yourself. It's like not realizing that the community wasn't about cool looking sweaters, but about hand-made cool looking sweaters.
Having said that, there might be another community that's more about cool looking sweaters, and new machine techniques that deliver really nice looking sweaters would be of interest to them. I actually think it's what is happening a bit in programming, there are niche that remain more about the manual programming, and others that are about any process that can lead to better outcomes.
Sometimes it can be murky, over enforcement of rules/norms can be off putting, and scare away newcomers. This is the common complaint on StackOverflow, you're putting yourself out there, asking a dumb question that makes you feel dumb already that you have to ask it, and you're immediately barraged and penalized that it is a duplicate, wasn't worded correctly, and so on, norms that you are new too. Makes you want to never ask a question again.