At least for me at least, I personally err on the side of having more freedom to look into places even if that means dealing with a couple of assholes.

This decision was about users from other instances coming here and causing trouble, not beehaw users going elsewhere. The intent isn’t to keep users siloed in here. Unfortunately, lemmy currently only supports two modes of interaction between instances: either you federate, or you don’t. More technologically mature fediverse platforms like mastodon have more nuanced options, and hopefully we’ll get similar options in lemmy soon that will allow, e.g., beehaw users out onto these instances without letting everyone on those instances in here.