It’s not automatic, admins have the option to ban with or without content removal.
Different instances deal with this differently and admins are also humans that sometimes make mistakes. Especially during holiday season there are frequently trolls running around with racist, transphobic or other offensive content. Sometimes they’re more obvious, sometimes they try to fly under the radar a bit by being less direct. In the end you’re at the mercy of the instance admins of the instance you signed up with and many instances will provide contact information to appeal bans.
Since this account was not a Lemmy.World account it’s not up to us to decide whether or not the user should be banned and whether their content should be removed.
Us not upgrading has nothing to do with making a point.
We’re aiming to run a stable instance, which can come at the cost of delayed updates.
We didn’t update to 0.19.4, and a few weeks later 0.19.5 was released with a number of critical bugfixes.
0.19.6 will have several more fixes for issues introduced in 0.19.4+, such as a fix for remote moderators updating local communities, allowing admins to filter modlog entries by moderator, as well as some performance issues reported by other instances.
We usually wait for other instances to run the latest version for some time to allow bug reports to surface before we update ourselves.