That particular part of the PieFed controversy was disproven, yet continually shared as misinformation nonetheless.

All of that kind of stuff is opt-in by the instance admins, nowhere close to hard-coded. Unlike the Tesseract situation. Also, Lemmy v1.0 will embedd a veto ability such that communities not acknowledged by Lemmy.ml will not be suggested to new instances - though this is opt-out as it can be configured from within the code, so also not hard-coded (though as opt-out rather than opt-in, is much closer to it).

There are plenty of reasons to not use PieFed, which is quite opinionated software (though Lemmy likewise is somewhat opinionated also, yet on the spectrum perhaps less so overall), but hard-coded blocklists is not one of them. Like Lemmy where people rail against the tankie devs, people just have a hate-on for the PieFed antifa dev, and like to smear the software with unwarranted accusations (weirdly instead of actually valid ones, which do exist, but perhaps those resonate less well somehow?).