As a former moderator of this site (actually the first mod, not counting owners), I thought I'd weigh in. I've been privvy to plenty of discussions in the past 'behind the curtain' and there's always more to the story than it appears on the surface.
In my years here, no one was ever banned for criticizing Tesla, NO ONE - only for violating TOS. (Look at footer on this page to find those if you're unfamiliar.)
@neroden has always been upfront in his criticism of Tesla & this forum, def of me
... since prob 2013. So the current TSLAQ spin of 'TMC is just a shill for Tesla' is completely false.
I have zero idea why he was banned and it's none of my business. Warnings are typically given, unless it was something particularly egregious. (One that comes to mind was a member who stalked me across other social media platforms & personally threatened me, admins saw it and banned him.) And since I doubt Neroden did anything that resulted in permanent ban without warning, I'm going with he probably knew he was walking near the edge of the Ban Cliff.
And yes, moderating is a tough gig. I lasted three years and then resigned. I was either too heavy handed, not heavy handed enough, too flippant, too serious, accused of censorship repeatedly for moving someone's post over to the right area of the forum to mingle with others on the same topic, etc etc etc. The forum was just not fun anymore & I originally joined to enjoy conversations with like-minded people.
I'm sure we'll see Neroden again on one of the many social media platforms. Maybe you'll learn why he was banned from him. Maybe it's only a temporary ban and he'll be back.
If you walk away with anything from this post, it's that the reasons for a ban are really none of our business. We cannot see the conversations that went on behind the scenes and I can think of situations where sharing the reasons for a ban would cross some privacy expectations. Then you open a whole new can of worms with 'why did they tell us about this ban but not that ban?'.
Maybe moderators could have chosen different wording, but I just saw wording from a mod that had reached the end of their rope on this subject. Kind of like my parents used to act after I had one more excuse for coming in past curfew when I was a teen. (Sorry Mom & Dad! Still no regrets, though.)