but yeah the amount of complaining about “tankies” is like 10x the amount of actual “tankie” content I see

Any time .ml users get wind of a thread they can bootlick in, they tend to swarm it. Hell, here's one from a user in this very comment section just a few days ago, on a major comm:

And I mean, fuck, man, .ml's memes comm, which is still one of the larger comms on the Fediverse, hardly goes a day without boot-throating tankie shite.