Yeah, it's a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over memes@lemmy.ml etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.

Probably a good idea to fork Lemmy at some point.

Only Reddit neoliberal crybabies whine about "tankies". From what I can see it's mostly baseless accusations/smear campaign because as I said, they are crybabies who cannot deal with the real world. It's an open source project. His views are not relevant to the discussion and not particularly that uncommon outside of isolated Westerner bubbles. Spez the Reddit CEO was the moderator of a paedophile subreddit (jailbait) but nobody is up in arms about that or concerned about going back if the API changes are rolled back. Those people are as lost as old people who love FoxNews, Facebook or any other commercially charged propaganda vehicle.

These leftists you hate so much have done something good. They've seized the means of communication for you. It's open source and decentralised, it's up to you (the community) what to do with it. If you are hardstuck on this then I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but the dev ain't one.