As with Wikipedia, there's a community of volunteers curating and moderating SO. Drama in that community doesn't necessarily bubble up in obvious ways like the site going down, but I'm sure it has an overall effect on content moderation and quality over time.

Yep. Same. Read HN at least 2-3x/wk and use Stack Overflow and a bunch of their related sub-sites about the same frequency. No clue who this is or what the event is referring to.

(Nor do I want to gain any clue)

I wouldn't expect you to. HN doesn't report on everything happening in every online community.

It was a thing Stack Exchange did to a Stack Exchange community moderator, that had a big impact on those involved with the Stack Exchange community. I didn't mean to imply that the repercussions were felt around the world; just that it was a big deal in the group that was intimately involved.

There were newspaper articles and half a dozen HN threads about it, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770

The only way I'm aware of it is prominent users/moderators having changed their display name to things like '<original name> - Reinstate Monica'.

Or maybe I also saw an HN thread about it, but mainly that. (I still see them.)

Same.