Warning: Incomming rambling essay
I agree with the sentiment that KF is more like the older internet but a huge part of that is just the format and relatively small size, not necessarily the freedom of speech (many older forums had arduous moderating overlording tyrants with their own niche cultures dictating what's relevant and allowed, imageboards where sicc when they arrived because posters weren't serfs serving the forum-aristocracy anymore, mods there where just an invisible hand making sure to contain only the most excessive of the sandboxed activity). KF is not even that true to the old forum formats because (IIRC) they didn't use to have the reactions/likes.
Likes, public display of allegiance to or against an opinion, cross-website identities creating a huge public square, is the main thing that really changed the discourse, and how moderation is handled and perceived. The internet used to be a series of connected Siberian villages, far between large groups of people with many small nooks and crannies with active users(I'm talking pre-YouTube), now it's a giant public Roman square.
People start, even subconsciously, to curtail their opinion to the masses, constantly wary of how exposed a post is to the world, and the thriving voices are those that enjoy this mass-social aspect. Look at how "designed" top-comments on youtube are, how much its author intentionally seeks likes from others.
Pervading hyperpolitical culture and its subsequent moderation hysteria are a product of this amplified public square where people are hyperconscious of a potential readers potential opinion, thus moderators must not only wield the banhammer but wield it in a loud and brutal manner so that there may be no room for doubt or rumors as to what is or isn't a crime/punishment, because if they don't, there's 10000s of people just waiting to scream as loudly as they can, welcoming the hysterical spectacle, doing everything they can to cause a ruckus. Thus moderators overreact, the crowd goes insane, more overreaction, and soon the only thing left is the war between mods and posters, no other topics of discussion remain.