It's cringy in hindsight, but to teenage me, getting booted from 4chan felt like a genuine betrayal. Saying nigger "Free speech" was what set it apart from tumblr and reddit, so it was a point of pride for the community at the time. The mass bannings and censorship over something as innocous as Zoe Quinn's dirty laundry was so out of left field that a lot of people who were otherwise apathetic started to care about GG simply on principal.
Funnily enough, if you look at the content quality on 4chan today, it's pretty obvious most of those spurned users never came back after 8chan died. I had already moved here by the time Tarrant caused Cloudflare to nuke the site, and I know Mark Mann's new 8chan.moe absorbed at least a portion of the old site's userbase. Whatever Moot's reasoning was, banning GG was probably the biggest mistake he could have made long term.