Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they're on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they're banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.

A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It's up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don't trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.