Sadly, it wasn't the later. I never mentioned spez and didn't even know what the CEO's name or username was until the blackouts (i.e. after i got permabanned).
I don't think the scraping is the full reason. I was not on lemmy/kbin or any other part of the fediverse and I still got this random permaban, in fact it happened before the pricing changes were announced on May 31st.
Also, my username there is different to what I'm using on the fediverse.
Prior to being permabanned I also never used the API for anything. Only used it for the scripts to wipe my account clean (so being permabanned doesn't typically prevent one from creating the API tokens or actually using the API, it seems).
I figure it was two things. First, the pretty printer did something so he knew it was all pretty printed. He asked that to show he really did go over every line (even if not true he probably made the effort hence the month delay).
Second he probably thought, dang these guys wrote 800 mb of code in six months. They’re good 。