From that Twitter thread it doesn't sound like they were outright blocked, right? It seems to say a permission check was added for those users, so they had to

From that Twitter thread it doesn't sound like they were outright blocked, right? It seems to say a permission check was added for those users, so they had to accepted as followers by people on Mastodon.social before they could interact with them or view their posts. That's a divisive thing to do, but it doesn't seem the same as a full disconnection - if there's anybody you know on the other server who wants to talk to you, or if there's anybody you were already happily following & talking to there then everything continues working just fine. It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first, effectively making their profiles default-private. I don't know anything about the specific objections at the time so I can't comment, but in general that seems like a fairly sensible way to deal with bad actors.