They refederated a couple hours ago (source). @antik made a post clarifying things over in the meta thread on ani.social’s site and cleared things up.
I understand people’s frustrations with seemingly arbitrary moderation decisions like this sometimes, but I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes making calls like that for a large instance like this. It is heartening to see that the review process did not take long and the decision reversed fairly quickly (<12 hours). This stands in contrast to the lemmy.ml admins that defederated ani.social for seemingly no reason and locked all discussion about it and it still stands. So, props to antik and LW admins on this one.