To steelman the opposing view, sources from inside the company might hold a little more water.

But that's just a steelman. If I were to guess as to what is actually going on, I would suspect that it's due some sort of automated reporting system that has been successfully gamified in the case of smaller content creators, and there's simply no human oversight of these features.

That said, IMHO trying to tease out if Meta is banning these accounts out of maliciousness or depraved indifference is a distinction without a difference. At the end of the day, the buck still stops with Meta.