But instead, Lemmy is somehow built to be even more authoritarian than Reddit. e.g. there is a modlog, but there is no modmail to ask questions in, no ability to notify people that they have been banned or that content has been removed, and when a post is removed the page claims that it never even so much as existed in the first place.

The "rights" of instance admins are supreme, and that trickles down so that mods inherit some of that, but the rights of individual users are that they can take it or like it... or leave and go elsewhere. I will leave it to you to judge whether such authoritarianism is inherently "bad", or whether democratic principles are "good"/better, I am just pointing out that the tankie-developed platform of Lemmy somehow ended up very similar to and somehow even more Reddit-esque than Reddit itself - crucially not in all ways or we would not be here, but in some of them.

And don't even get me started on the practices of lemmy.ml itself...

Conversely, PieFed is very different - many of those notification types do exist here, like notifications of mod actions are sent out (almost annoyingly so - do I really need to be notified of being banned from a whole slew of communities that I never even heard of nor ever indicated even the slightest interest in? however, I do find it refreshing to be notified of such matters TOO MUCH rather than not at all, since in Lemmy much thought is given to the concerns of instance admins, but comparatively very little to the common user), and also users no longer have the right to delete their own posts, or rather they have the right to delete THEIR content that they contributed, but they don't have the right to wipe out all of the discussions that took place underneath the thread they they started. e.g. they can ask a question and they can delete their question if they like, but they can no longer delete all of the very helpful answers that other people offered to them, which potentially may have involved some large amount of effort to research and respond with.