The thing is, I was never (admin) suspended before, and I can think of only two or three small-subreddit moderator bans in the last 10 years, the mystery-shadowban had zero communication involved, and the appeal was (at least on-paper) determined to be granted because it was a mistake...

So I'm assuming this was some case where my ISP rotated my IP to one that was previously assigned to someone else, or vice-versa, or just accessing the site through some coffee-shop free wifi, etc.

That said, I'm quite willing to believe it's gotten way worse since then, especially since nowadays "moderation" can be outsourced to an LLM that doesn't reliably understand context, sarcasm, or quoting the other guy's posts.