Beehaw has been asking for better moderation tools for two years, it's nothing new.

Also the lemm.ee admins burnout made people question how to deal with toxic users

The reputational anti-features are part of what makes me suspicious. I agree entirely with your impression of it.

And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it's gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.

The other thing though is Piefed's automated subscription feature, which, if it gains enough clout, will allow it to effectively promote or undermine, as the devs prefer, communities or even entire instances, and to erect a barrier to entry for new communities and new instances, simply by granting or withholding inclusion on its subscription lists. That's the primary thing that triggers my suspicion.

Well - that and the fact that aside from anti-features like reputation and automated subscriptions, I don't see anything notable about the software, and to the degree that it differs from lemmy or mbin, it seems if anything to be inferior, which makes the sudden flood of praise just that much more suspicious.