It's unclear to me that it's a deliberate effort to kill it so much as reshape it to suit his desires, and either genuine ignorance or absolute lack of care abo

It's unclear to me that it's a deliberate effort to kill it so much as reshape it to suit his desires, and either genuine ignorance or absolute lack of care about the damage done to communities previously on there. It would, after all, be relatively simple to just destroy the system with godlike power over it, unless you have some other goal. I would speculate, from the multiplication of freenode-related services and the few attempted partnerships, that one goal is to monetize/reshape freenode's community into not being solely IRC-centered. A bunch of his pre-freenode actions seem focused around monetization, so it seems to logically follow. A bunch of the actions seem to just be petty, though - as cited in the last thread about freenode, he klined all of irccloud, presumably because irccloud posted something in support of Libera chat, and was quoted as saying "fck irc cloud". He's apparently been klining anyone who submits things he dislikes on the freenode HN-alike.