I don't think the admin who's to blame is acting like a dictator, they are acting more like a narcissist with a fragile ego who deceive themselves when they do something wrong. A total spez, if you will, whom people should have no doubts about calling out when they put themselves in position of power.
The problem is, they had no problem deleting months and history of comments and because they aren't willing to recognize what they did wrong or the circumstances that led up to it, it is likely they won't have a problem going full-on psychotic in the future as well, and that is a very toxic foundation upon which the most popular lemmy instance founded upon. Reddit is proof that it won't stop the growth or persistence of the platform, but you will get things like the whole Reddit API debacle. People and developers might better spend their time contributing to other instances.
Yeah, I'm really getting the feeling they are just trying to bury it and ignore it. I was having trouble accessing the modlog, but when I was able to, they seemed to have gone through the effort to eliminate a lot of the entries, which included my account purge, ban, and ban reason. They still haven't even bothered to answer the ticket I put up on tickets.mastodon.world, maybe I'll add a screenshot to that later to show the ticket status and the time it has spent as unanswered. No admin has replied to me directly, and the closest I've seen any admin reply on the issue is to criticize the kbin.social instance as reliable because of the criticism they get on them.
The real problem is this is being done in bad faith, and if that's their core drive, then the only thing they'll do in the future is make-up better sounding excuses to cover their asses.