I’m sorry to hear it, Steve. Your years of hard work on behalf of the PSF remain appreciated by some.
I think there’s some confusion over language here. Best I can tell, “soft moderation” is industry-standard language for gimmicks (whether automated or manual) that attach “warnings” to posts without actually removing then. Discourse appears to have more than one such gimmick. When it happens, Discourse collapses the post, leaving only a, e.g., “post hidden by community flags” box, which a user can click to expand the message. I don’t know of any case in the topic at issue where a post was actually deleted. I have seen it happen in the “help” topic, where the latest incoherent post about “genuine random numbers” from an apparent serial “crank” vanished without a trace. Overkill to my eyes, but hard to care much.
Mods editing posts goes clearly beyond any notion of “soft” moderation I can find in the literature, That has happened, to one person in particular. The irony there is so thick it would take an industrial jackhammer to break through it. That person is in fact radically welcoming, but not in a way that’s “in style”. They’re informed by Marxist political philosophy, drawing on academically deep theories about class struggle and revolution, not on appeasing a collection of “victim identity groups”.
In any case, the powers that be have made it abundantly clear that they think mods editing posts is A-OK. Discourse saves an edit history, but you’re never going to know what was changed (let alone why) without the material pain of digging through the history.
That’s unacceptable to my eyes too, but so it goes. We’re both old and in the way 
.