StackOverflow is a community and communities are sustained by shared values. It makes perfect sense to oust leaders from a community who are out of alignment with the values the community wants to support.
I think the problem here is that those values are not in fact being defined by the community, in toto. They are being defined by a very vocal and relatively small subgroup. Furthermore, the author doesn't even seem to be opposed to those values, just highly ambivalent about them.
That’s what surprises me about this. I see the StackExchange sites as a place where people help each other make their software a little less crappy. In all my years using it, I don’t think I’ve ever used a third person pronoun (gendered or not) for another user. I don’t think anybody has used any pronoun except “you” to refer to me either. Usually if I’m referenced at all it’s “@smudgy’s answer is wrong because x,y and z”. How often can pronouns come up?
StackOverflow is made of of people, not technical knowledge seeking robots. Those people are messy and will inevitably come with a hole bundle of values in addition to their desire to ask and answer technical questions.
The community has been very vocal on this issue - they stand with the fired moderator. If what you said was true, the CEO of the company would get ousted, because clearly his values are not aligned with the values of the community.
That's straight up unenforceable though. And I doubt you would be left with much of a community if you kicked out everyone that isn't at least as hard-line on the issue as the described policy and its interpretation.
This person wasn't AFAIK kicked out of the community completely. They were removed from a leadership position. Those in leadership are held to higher standards than others in the community.
