It's not "rustaceans" as one whole. It's a very vocal minority (both rustacean and not) that make it everyone else's problem that they don't agree with the AI industry as a whole. I've had people try to convince me that I'm destroying the planet by using LLMs just because the process of creating the LLM was harmful to the climate. But that's like saying software piracy harms sales. Maybe the argument has more merit for models hosted in the cloud, but I use local ones too.

There's a shameboard that curates a list of projects that don't explicitly and unconditionally ban all use of generative AI. Their term for projects that have a policy other than a total ban is "permissive" and it is treated as a sign to avoid that project/community. It's such a mess. Cancel culture is never the answer. I believe it is the right move to ban this completely unproductive and toxic kind of behavior.

If you can understand that some behavior is toxic and should be banned, then you should understand the people behind "cancel culture." Alternatively, if you see "cancelling" "cancel culture" as not "cancel culture", then you can understand the paradox of tolerance, and why an idealistic fully tolerant approach is not possible either way.