I hadn’t seen the thread and just read it now. Moderation started poor with this failure of a modnote:
FFS let’s please not discourage people asking OPs what kind of discussion they were hoping to have, especially when the OP didn’t frame it well on their first try.
It devolved from there. Der_Trihs’s posting history, about which I have no opinion, and his DMs are neither here nor there wrt whether the individual posts were on topic. And they were far more on topic than later posts, e.g., @puzzlegal being sad about US immigration policy.