Your claim is that "quite literally every person you interact with professionally has an anecdote about" the internal mental state of other people.

Even if everyone else on the Internet thinks a person has a certain belief or motivation or ideology, that doesn't mean that person actually has that belief or motivation or ideology.

I'm speaking to my own mental state, as well as to my general impression of what other curators told me, and the frustrations they espoused. There were chat rooms where people could have easily spent all day talking about how cool it is to power-trip, if they'd actually been power-trippers. Instead, they talked about how helpless* they felt as new people kept coming in and making the same innocent mistakes; about how they had no tools to deal with this except the ones that left offsite users with a bad impression; about how annoying it was to be constantly aware of that offsite bad impression when they were trying to do things necessary to the site's objective; etc.

What you also seem to be missing is that since the Prosus acquisition, "SO mods" (and the rest of the community, who are much greater in number and take the large majority of the actions incorrectly deemed "moderation" by outsiders) and "SO staff" were in active conflict most of the time. The LLM-content ban policy was against the staff's (really the company, who employ a handful of staff as liaisons) wishes; the fighting over this got so bad that there was an actual moderation strike and an extended period where the site got the amount of spam you'd expect for a site that size instead of the almost miraculously small amount it would normally get. (The spam filtering also involved community-operated automated systems that were suspended in solidarity.) Then we got hit with proposal after proposal for AI-powered features that were obviously terrible half-baked nonsense with no real value ad; we constantly tore into them on the meta site; the company showed zero sign whatsoever of caring in the slightest, while Prashanth Chandrasekhar (the new CEO) would give TedX talks and such demonstrating a complete ignorance of how the community felt about AI in general.