Kicking a genius out of p5p and off blogs.perl.org for technical criticism of other people's work is shameful and deeply offends my understanding of freedom of speech.

That's not what happened.

We would be better off if p5p was a ferocious sharktank of adult concepts rather than a kindergarten of childish hurt feelings.

I don't understand this hypothetical, because that's not what happened.

I don't know enough to take a side

But you did.

Let's go through a handful of Reini's claims. For example, from Overview of Current Maintainer Fails:

p5p refuses to take bug and security reports

That's nonsense. Easily refuted.

the toolchain is typically the gathering place for all the important people too incompetent to do core

That's an attack, backed up by... what exactly?

I've looked over all my >100 distroprefs patches, and in the end problems are only with ether and schmorp. schmorp at least knows what he is doing and eventually comes up with fixes by himself.

This is inconsistent with the previous approach, but clearly an attack on Karen. It's also backed up by... nothing.

The maintainer doesn't have an idea how compile-time vs run-time works

Same.

It's pretty hard to have faith in someone who decides 90% on the wrong side and only by luck sometimes makes a right decision.

Clearly an attack.

the p5p principles of ruling by incompetence, power and abuse are not tolerated

Same.

I could go on.

maybe some snowflakes need to stop melting when light hits them

I think it's more likely that volunteers don't want to take abuse from someone who refuses to communicate with anything other than abuse. There are only so many patches I'm likely to review if every comment is answered with "you're too stupid and incompetent to ask questions, just merge the patch or you're deliberately destroying something".

But what do I know, I'm only (as you say) far better informed on these matters.