And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don’t, they suck at it).

I agree with you here (and generally the whole post, glad to have found it here). While I think they do suck at community building (and might even admit to as much or defend the need for it) I would add that from my perspective the amount of reflexive dog-piling and harsh criticism hurled their way just for or triggered by their being communists/tankies has probably made it pretty difficult. And unfortunately and problematically so I'd say. Now such may just be the way things are and it had to be navigated if they were ever to build a better community ... sure. And being open communists may then as just a matter of practical reality hinder their community building capacities. But I feel like it's worth acknowledging.

Also, their position of opposing a somewhat consumeristic culture of having a demanding relationship with open source developers is also worth recognising. I wasn't receptive to those arguments in the past, but have since come around to it TBH.

And, the way they've approached federation and presenting their own instance has enabled the lemmy-verse to not have a single monolithic community or culture. They chose before the migration to not push their instance as the flagship and never seemed to want that. They always promoted other instances, and have always federated their own instance fairly widely. So in a way, they've ensured that they didn't have to be the primary community builders for the lemmy space, and I think that has paid off rather well given the relatively small user size here (apart from lemmy . world being too big).