I agree that defederation should be a last resort. With the ability for individual users to block other users, communities, and even instances (currently dependant on the app you use) this really seems like it should fall on the individual to tailor their feeds. Of course no one should give a platform to bigoted speech. However, this can come from any instance and from what you've said about the admins of hexbear it would seem they are putting in a good faith effort to moderate. Overall, I'm against defederation at this time.
I too have been using Revanced but I'm not experienced with updating third party apps. How is it done?