I see a lot of people taking issue with how it was handled. An obvious troll controlling sock puppets apparently spurred this, sure.
But the mods of Lemmy World went on a reddit-like spiteful ban spree, apparently forgetting that we can all see their modlogs or simply not caring about it. People got up in arms over the very childish and assholish behavior of the Lemmy World mods, and folks were eventually unbanned in some cases, but still banned from the main communities as punishment. For example, people saying they would just leave and federate their own instance got banned with mod messages telling them "let us help you with that".
From Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine:
[1] clarifies how multitasking typically works, which was usually just really fast switching at the time of the book.