I thought Lemmy was founded to get away from those type of shenanigans that happened all to often on reddit?
You thought wrong. Lemmy was created as a decentralized link aggregation platform for the fediverse. Also, Lemmy’s creators are not in charge of lemmy.world. That’s the whole point: people can create their own instances with their own rules and moderation philosophies without having to answer to any one ruling entity.