I do agree with you completely there, it's just that HN doesn't tend to take well to pointing out that particular stripe of awfulness and that makes it a non-starter as a reason.
He's definitely a case where I would broadly recommend marginalized groups to stay far away from his tooling if they are planning on interacting with the development team in any way. The man is an demagogue (and openly proud of it) and an understated element to his bad behavior in co-operating with others is that it's in part driven by that demagoguery (just reference the blogpost in the previous comment and how much of it is dedicated to crying about "cancel culture" where the reality is really just that he was an asshole to people and they showed him the door[1], very little about it had to do with his (IMO shitty) opinions.
As far as software choices go; Fully agreed, although I always recommend people to not just go by public reputation and to always investigate before making a decision (in the case of Soapbox, you'll notice I linked both the developers resignation post and the post that caused relations with him and other maintainers to seriously start souring, so that one can make their own assessment).
Pleroma for example got initially accused of being developed by neonazis due to an early instance modifying their source code to ignore incoming message privacy flags, everything was just set to be on the public timeline, all of the time. It's in reality completely wrong; in fact numerous developers to the software have been rather staunchly anti-fascist even since its very beginning, but that wasn't known by the public so the reputation of the project got tarred for years. Similarly, one admin blamed not removing hateful content on not having the tools, again, completely wrong, but then Pleroma got tarred with "not having basic moderation tools", even though it ironically has the must fine-grained moderation tools compared to anything else out there (you can literally write your own bit of code to automatically moderate and integrate it in the software itself if you wanted to).
Finally when it comes to users submitting bugs: with the fediverse that usually doesn't actually directly go to the developer but instead lands at the feet of the instance maintainer, who makes the decision on whether or not to report it to the developers community. There's a certain sense of connection, but it's usually not as deeply tied as one would think.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/
