Its not like they weren't warned or anything. The mods told the community that they got approached for an interview in a pinned post. Declaring they won't be doing it unless they had someone really really good at speaking.
In comes one of the oldest mods, who genuinely is completely anti all forms of work, from when the sub was actually against the very concept of working, claiming to have media training (they had been interviewed before, through email). And they launch themselves to the occasion and the rest is history.
I quite like it precisely because it provided no recommendations. I'm not enticed to waste time watching something I wasn't interested in 3 seconds ago. If I want to watch something I have to look it up and that's usually the end of it.
Its his archetype. He's a jerk protagonist and the show fully treats him like so. He's constantly trying to take advantage of people, specially Darwin and has a massively inflated ego. Big part of the comedy is meant to be watching his plans deservedly blow up in his face.
I don't know how to break this to you but its not 2016 anymore and Tumblr isn't as popular as it used to. Most of these are grown ass adults which absolutely atrocious reading comprehension.
This is also why Tumblr is tamer about social issues these days, all the pearl clutching teenagers who will cringe at their actions later in life are on Twitter.
The former lead dev (who is still part of the team) seems to think many people are out to get him for no good reason. He has claimed repeatedly that Calyx devs have sent harassers to target him for years (from spamming gore or nazi content in the matrix channels, to swatting him and almost getting him killed by the police) and that they constantly speak ill of him, but has never actually shown any proof. Instead, he sources his own past claims about how he has shown proof, in a sort of endless loop.
Also, youtuber Techlore made a 5 second joke about GOS's extreme approach to security in his mostly positive review of it, which the lead Dev took as a personal attack. After which he started attributing harassment to him too. He made a later video talking about it, and Louis Rossman commented on it expressing concern. After which, the lead Dev accused him to being complicit in the harassment.
Eventually he stepped down as project manager, citing how the harassment and bullying he constantly got was too much. But to my knowledge no one has actually seen it ever.
I strongly believe he did kill himself, but was given the golden window of opportunity to do so. Having an assassin sneak all the way in there without a single mistake is harder and costlier than letting a criminal with no other way out kill himself.
It mostly seems like your personal experiences and server choices might be giving you the wrong idea. It might be the reason your communities don't make the switch, but the wider userbase doesn't really know about any this at all.
If it was as prevalent and the big reason, plurality would be more common in general servers or those dedicated to some other topic. It's my, and probably a sizeable portion of people's, first time hearing about PluralKit. Even knowing about plurality and systems prior to this. I'm in a bunch of servers with indescribable amounts of people and this really hasn't come up at all.
If you were to ask a random discord user/mod/server owner why they don't switch to Matrix, they most likely won't answer "It doesn't have PluralKit and I/my friends use it", but "What's Matrix?/What's PluralKit?/How so you use it?/Discord's fine/But why?/IDC"
Like, all power to you, this shows an important missing feature for your community in Matrix, but I don't think this is it.
Maybe its cause its corporate backed instead of some guys? As in, they have tech support and people to sue.