100% of this drama was self-inflicted. You could have PMed an admin describing your problem and asking if they knew what was up. They seem like pretty helpful and reasonable people to me.
AKA, “we are too big to fail”?
Doesn’t really follow from any of what anyone has said - we’re not talking about lemmy.world failing, we’re talking about it closing registration. The one thing Lemmy needs to survive long-term is more active users. Putting up barriers to that, especially on the most popular instance, will hurt growth for the entire lemmyverse - because if there’s one thing new users implicitly don’t understand, it’s how federation works. A decent portion of people who try to sign up and fail will just give up and go back to reddit, and we’re all worse-off for it.
Not to mention that most people who do successfully join figure out how federation works pretty fast, and are more than capable of moving to another instance if they consider any of what you’ve mentioned important to them at all.