Interestingly, my reports on racist posts are being accepted much more often than they were before, so this is in fact not happening.
The site was also consumed in horrific discourse for the last week (topic being "is making chili for your neighbor racist, ableist and oppressing autistic people?") so all in all it seems to behaving as usual.
Exactly what kind of views do you think moderates were worried about not being tolerated? Going by the definition of the term it seems unlikely that anyone, much less millions, was previously deterred by policy.
He wasn’t banned (only suspended for a few hours) and that was directed at a single trans person. That last part is almost certainly the reason why he got that warning unlike the many people who have generically expressed similar beliefs.
Millions of political moderates are stopping by to see what happens when a large-scale public forum begins to tolerate freedom of speech.