The complaint by the author that Meta should moderate individual users rather than simply block "loosely moderated" servers feels like an unreasonable expectation.
Exactly; one of the most valuable things federation brings to the table is the ability to choose which servers to federate with and which not to. I don't want Meta moderating individual users on sites they don't own.
The "moderation" line for e-mail has been drawn at spam/hacking/phishing. If the fediverse succeeds, then it will do the same. Servers that fail to police spam/hacking/phishing will be blocked, everything else will be allowed. If the lines are drawn elsewhere, each server will choose their own lines, there will be no agreement, and thus no ability to share blocklists, and the fediverse will be in name only.
There is a very good reason to see this path being taken, given what the Apple App Store disallows and new EU law with rigid speech requirements.
I suppose it fits with the rest of this article being rather disingenuous. Alex Gleason, Spinster and Neenster are part of a controversial group that detractors call "trans-exclusionary radical feminism." For better or for worse (the details of this controversy are not necessarily relevant), instances of that nature (and pretty much anything that runs on Soapbox) are defederated by a lot of Fediverse servers, and it seems that Meta for one reason or another has joined those servers. Gleason is well aware of this controversy.
My best guess is that Meta hopes to make itself appear more palatable to mainstream Mastodon servers by also defederating.