I suspect that these moderators are heavily responsible for reduced engagement across the whole site. Enough that they likely know more people leave their domains quicker and with fewer clicks than on non-powermod forums. And after they lost wave after wave of users that were creating content and other subforums are becoming harder to artificially inflate to all.

And they might also be eyeing a porn ban and knowing that these powermods are degenerate pervert they don't care. This might literally play into their plans to remove these advertiser repellent forums and break the powermod stranglehold. If they are doing it right, they will likely softly and quietly suffocate the most extreme porn forums first and work their way up to the major gonewild subs.