But I agree with him here that there's been no general penalty observed.
The only things I've noticed are a couple of people reaching out on account of my being on the leaderboard (no, I can't get your posts approved, yes, I will report your trying to do so), and having corresponded with the mod team for years (occasionally viewpoint issues, mostly boring submission stuff such as titles, disambiguated URLs, and occasional spam), what I think is a fairly good mutual understanding. Not always agreement, but general respect. I'll make my case or argument, and almost always accept the moderation response. I've had numerous submissions entered into the 2nd chance pool.
Overall calibre of discussion for an open and general-interest website is excellent. Occasional visiting expertise is an added plus.
My own submissions sometimes succeed, are occasionally flagged, and mostly just languish in the "new" page.