I'm sure it's just a coincidence that everything that can be wielded against them either just isn't implemented (good mod tooling) or doesn't work properly (user/instance blocking)

With Voyager it's possible. I blocked ml long time ago

You can. If you go to the website, you can go to your profile, settings, blocks and there should be a "block instance" menu there.

Thats the default, your instance might have modified it.

Not that it doesn't block all users from an instance, only all the communities.

I can't ever forget @davel@lemmy.ml they're in the modlog way too much for that lolol

But I was under the impression that they were just an admin and not a dev and that dessalines and Nutomic were the main devs with dessalines making architectural and roadmap decisions

Frankly, there's no other explanation why blocking doesn't work properly after 4 years (User blocking was rolled out in 0.12 in 2021), but yet a bug that did actual direct harm to .ml had a hot fix deployed in a matter of days