Being overly punitive feels like doing something, when often a lighter touch would be healthier in the long run.

This definitely isn’t true. The best subreddits/Lemmy communities by far are the most heavily moderated. The reason why moderation in OW/LoL/TF2/etc fails is because there simply aren’t enough mods to match the playerbase, which is an inevitability in the modern matchmaking scene where all the players are mixed together all the time.

Back in the days of dedicated servers, you would learn which servers were unmoderated pits and which ones had quality players on them because the mods were always online. Nowadays every multiplayer experience is the pit.