The silence from Lemmy developers on this is damning. If this was an accident (i.e. lumping "kbinbot" in with a blanket block of other user agents), it would have been a two second fix. Even more damning is that common agents that are being used for bot attacks, as discussed in the Lemmy matrix, are not blocked. For example:
curl -i --user-agent "python-requests/1.2.3" https://lemmy.ml/
Works fine.
It would be lovely if posts had a unique ID (UUID of some sort) that was shared between instances. That way, rather than using the thread ID, a unique ID is used that points at that particular thread, comment, or microblog. But alas, this doesn't exist, and we're here.