I agree. I have every sympathy for the people on the CoC working group and on the SC - code of conduct issues are an extremely stressful and unpleasant subject to have to deal with, and I’d never be able to do that job myself. And I don’t want to add more stress to what they do. Even if this was a mistake, people make mistakes, and we need to accept that and be forgiving.
Having said that, I hope that this suspension, and the subsequent community feedback, results in some form of follow-up review from the CoC work group and the SC, to understand how the situation could have been handled better. While I only saw the parts of the offending discussions that were on Discourse, my view is that it was, in general, a fairly difficult conversation, with strongly held (and stated!) views on both sides. The behaviour pointed out as leading to the suspension wasn’t ideal, but it certainly wasn’t unique (maybe in degree it was worse, and maybe some specifics were inappropriate, but in context it was all part of a conversation that had been let get out of hand).
My hope is that the various parties involved in handling this situation (moderators, CoC working group, SC, and whoever in the PSF handles this sort of issue) will look very closely at how to handle discussions that are getting out of hand, so that problems like this can be addressed before individual behaviour becomes problematic. I’d like to see people taking more care when they make statements that (for whatever reason) they can’t back up with evidence - “I know stuff I can’t tell you” is an extremely frustrating argument, almost guaranteed to inflame a debate rather than calming it. With luck, we can all learn from it and do better in future.