In my opinion, this blocking philosophy is hurtful to the Fediverse. To me it feels like EEE from the PieFed devs who clearly dislike the Lemmy devs.
The way that the defederation claim was originally made was that Piefed automatically blocks lemmy.ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad and automatically repopulates those instances as blocked if an instance owner wipes their defederation. This wasn’t true. And lemmy.ml has never been on the autoblocklist.
Yes, you're correct! And the message I linked no longer includes this disinformation.