But that's a pretty serious escalation.
Consider this scenario:
Alice: This code is retarded.
Bob: Mod action! Two day ban for saying a slur.
Alice: Lol no.
That's pretty trivial, but how do you escalate from there to mass resignation with none of the fight leaking?
Followup: the Rust core team has now spoken.
They confirm: there was some incident involving the core team. It was unclear how this ought to be handled. The core team and the mods tried to hash it out over _eight months_, but eventually all trust was lost.