I think people are leaving lemmy.ml and finding alternatives on instances that are a little bit less restrictive in terms of free speech and criticism of certain governments.
It's definitely that, though I would prefer to see !linux become the defacto home of Linux over programming dev. Simply for the connotations of programming dev feeling like a gate keep. But it is what it is.
Is there some drama going on? Looking at their rules, it doesn't seem to be extraordinary. And their recent comments and posts doesn't clarify things up for me either.