and so the goalpost moves from "it's hate speech" to "it's whatever we unilaterally decide to be verbotten to speak about".

Well I wasn’t the one who said “it’s hate speech.” There are a number of things that get content-moderated.

Hate speech, porn, bullying, doxxing, disinformation, Islamist propaganda, violent imagery, revenge porn, animal abuse imagery, incitements to violence, criminal planning, drug dealing, arms dealing, gambling, fraud, etc

As a free speech maximalist, are you willing to defend all of those with the same vigor as the COVID case? Or do you too actually draw a content-based line somewhere (while pretending you don’t?)