This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
You seem to be confusing Lemmy.world with Lemmy as a whole. Lemmy is free to be used for anything by anyone.
Lemmy.world is the largest and most mainstream Lemmy server, so they need to be especially careful about legal issues. If lemmy.world gets taken down due to mirroring content hosted on lemmy.dbzer0.com, the whole network would partially collapse because of how many users and communities are hosted on lemmy.world.
It’s not even close to worth the risk. This is how federation is supposed to work.
