Thanks for your answer. The Rust COC is certainly short and concise, which I prefer if we really need them at all that is. There certainly are also situations where moderation can keep things on topic. When I say moderation I mostly mean tone policing or sanctioning certain views, not the removal of spam or memes that dillute a topic, although the latter at some point comes down to opinion too.

I had this 2 star repos for a niche problem with perhaps 2-3 visitors per month and someone quite aggressively suggested that I should put one up. At the same time more an more projects put one up and I wondered where this push in OSS came from.

Suddenly projects needed committees to enforce some form of weird compliance. I just think it didn't improve conduct in any community that I saw. Not that you have to look very far to find eccentric personalities but I never thought that to be a problem, on the contrary.